Yes, the SOE has bought the Pike River mine.
Why would they do that?
Do they have money to burn?
No Right Turn has made a disturbing connection between the purchase and a statement made earlier by Don Elder:
"A year ago, Elder warned necessary preliminary work ahead of any fresh coal extraction at Pike River following the explosions could take years and cost $50 million to $100 million.
At the time he confirmed the miner's interest in Pike River and was "almost certainly the only company with the credibility, knowledge, experience and track record to mine the resource safely and economically".
[...]
State-owned Solid Energy, if successful with a bid, would likely look to develop the mine in a joint opencast/ underground approach, Elder said at that time.
It would need to get part of the surrounding land removed from schedule 4 protected conservation land for an opencast operation which would be in difficult access and resource conditions."
Looks like they're planning to rip the top off that sucker, once they've overturned the schedule 4 protections the area now enjoys.
Pike River mine looks set to be the field for a very ugly battle indeed.
Friday, March 9, 2012
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4 comments:
Here's what they will try to do.
They will extend the road further up Pike stream until they are nearly above the current pit bottom area.
They will choose a spot where the overburden is relatively thin (the original mine plan was actually going to break the surface at a spot where the overburden is only about 30m thick) and they will strip off the overburden and open cast a small area. The area that is mined will then form a flat utility area where they will develop underground operations from.
In this way they may actually bypass the 2km tunnel altogether and make it largely redundant.
The reason Pike chose to use a 2km tunnel was to minimise environmental damage and to save maintenance costs associated with keeping a road open in a high rainfall area for 20 years or so.
It is highly likely that solid energy will attempt to take a much less environmentally friendly approach and will try to defend this by saying the current set up is dangerous.
I believe you have the goods on this, Shunda and will watch with great interest as they unfold their 'sensible idea'.
Solid energy have an appalling record with open cast mining at the Greymouth end of the coal field (it is so bad they even admitted it!) most people are not familiar with what they have done in this area.
The updated google earth photos don't lie though, you can even see the crap that has fallen into the 10 mile river.
Dirty little despoilers!
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