Coal news and updates

Wyoming coal mine prepares to move huge excavating equipment

Cloud Peak Energy is preparing to move a huge piece of excavating equipment 43 miles from one Wyoming mine to another in pursuit of deeper coal.

The machinery, called a dragline, consists of a shovel suspended by cables from a mobile crane. Draglines in Powder River Basin coal mines are among the world's biggest machines, handling up to 100 cubic yards of earth at a time.

Their job is to excavate the dirt and rock overlying the coal at the open-pit mines.

Gillette-based Cloud Peak Energy has disassembled the dragline at its Cordero Rojo mine about 25 miles south of Gillette. The company plans to move the dragline to its Antelope mine about 60 miles south of Gillette.

The dragline has been at Cordero Rojo since 1993.

Cloud Peak is moving the dragline to Antelope to address a problem faced at every mine in the basin, where the underlying coal deposits are tilted.

Miners typically exploit the shallower coal first. Over time, they must dig deeper and deeper through the overlying dirt and rock to get to the coal.

The dragline move will help Cloud Peak dig deeper and maintain Antelope's historic production levels of a little more than 30 million tons per year, company spokesman Rick Curtsinger said.

"It allows us to maintain production as the strip ratio goes up, as it does across the basin," Curtsinger said.

The ratio of overburden to coal also has been increasing at Cordero Rojo. There, however, Cloud Peak is cutting production by about 10 million tons per year starting this year.

The last time a company disassembled a dragline at a Powder River Basin mine and reassembled it at another was in the mid-1990s, Cloud Peak senior project manager Clint Cooper said.

The dragline couldn't realistically make the 43-mile trip from Cordero Rojo to Antelope under its own power. The farthest the machine would move during mining is about three-quarters of a mile.

Cloud Peak officials hope to have the disassembled dragline moved to the reassembly site by mid-August. The dragline should be operating at Antelope by the middle to end of next year, they said.

source: http://trib.com