A MUSWELLBROOK Chamber of Commerce and Industry breakfast has been told the economic life of Drayton Mine will come to an end in the first quarter of next year.
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Drayton South operational readiness manager, Karl Jones, addressed the gathering on Tuesday.
Mr Jones stepped in as guest presenter for Drayton South Project Director, Rick Fairhurst, who accompanied the Planning Assessment Commission on a site visit to Drayton.
Mr Jones told Chamber members the situation for the existing Drayton Mine is reaching a critical stage.
“Drayton is coming close to the point where all the economic coal of the mine has been removed.
“Currently, there’s a lot of work going on to shuffle rosters, change mine plans at the mine to try and extend the life of the mine due to the delays in the approval of the Drayton South project,” he said.
Mr Jones told the audience Drayton retrenched over 100 people last year.
He said if the Drayton South Coal Project is approved by the PAC the road construction would be done using “Drayton people and Drayton equipment.”
“We’ll be building an engineered arch to get the equipment backward and forward [and] the initial capital investment to build the road and pipelines is around about $132-million,” he said.
When asked by the Chamber president, Mike Kelly, whether coal production would be consistent through the road building period Karl Jones responded “That’s a good question, I’m not sure.”
“We would possibly mine coal at Drayton that is less than attractive if necessary, but that sort of detail we will work through at the date of [possible] approval,” he said.
Mention was also made at the breakfast of a horse trial currently being run by Anglo American.
Fairfax Media asked for more details of the trial.
Anglo American’s Matt Frodsham explained nearly 12 months ago Anglo American decided to do its own trial involving horses on rehabilitated land.
Mr Frodsham said it is similar to the cattle trial set up by the Upper Hunter Mining Dialogue.
“The horses are stock horses; they’re as valuable as thoroughbreds [and] they’ve been having foals and there’s been no adverse impacts.
“The health impacts of those horses have been consistently monitored by the owners so we’ve left that entirely in their hands to advise us because we’re not horse people,” Mr Frodsham said.
Fairfax Media asked how many horses are included in the trial, which is examining the impacts of blasting, dust and vibration.
We were told the trial includes six foals, one mare and a two-year-old filly.
