YALLOURN RESERVE

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1936, Page 12

YALLOURN RESERVE

VICTORIA’S BROWN COAL. Ten thousand visitors, they say, go every year to see Yallourn, Victoria’s famous brown coal mining area, and source of the State’s entire electricity supply, in the Latrobe Valley, Gipps : land, writes Mary Corringham, in the Melbourne Argus. Here thd mine is not hidden away in the bowels of the earth at all, but is a great gftsh ori the surface, a miniature canyon; an “open cut.” I stood on the trunk of a tree that had lived twenty million years’ ago. Tobacco brown it was in colour, and fragments of it when broken off felt unexpectedly light in weight. NO wonder, it was nearly three-quarters water, as is most so-called “brOwn coal!” It lay at the bottom Of an “open cut,” two hundred feet below grass level, just one of countless millions of such trees. Men at mV side were talking in billions. Fifteen million tons of brown coal had already been taken from the mine, they Said, and the additional eight million tons uncovered of overburden represent* ed a very small fraction of the six thousand million tons in the Yalflourn field, which, again, was but ? small fraction of the thirty-seven thousand million tons in the Latrobe Valley.

Not only is the deposit practically inexhaustible—on annual outposts aplproxirjating four million tons the area embraced by Yallourn will last for 1500 years, but the cost of working it is relatively low. All the coal in the Yallourn area is capable of being won by the cheap open-cut method, whereby the overburden is first removed by a dredge having a downward reach of 26 feet, and an upward reach (by rotating the bucket ladder) of 30 feet, and ah output capacity of 3500 tons in eight hours. The coal thus exposed is excavated by two dredges, each having a downward reach of 90 feet, and a normal output capacity of 400 tons in eight hours. One is on the surface of the coal, and the other 90 feet- down, reaching down to the bottom of the deposit. In the open cut as at present developed the overburden is 30 feet thick,' and the coal 180 feet thick. For the whole Yallourn field the average thickness of overburden is less than 50 feet, and that of coal over 200 feet. Nowhere else in the world is the ratio of coal to overburden so favourable, and this accessibility is one of its principal advantages.

GERMANY THE INSPIRATION

In many of similar mines in Germany, the home of the brown coal industry, where the latest perfections of • opcn-cut machinery have bden evolved '■ from long years of experience, the ■ ratio of coal to overburden as compared with Yallourn, is often reversed. One successful company in Germany is established on a field where 100 feet of overburden cover a. coal seam of only 33 feet. Germany, it may be noted, has been the inspiration for most of the progress made at Yallourn. ( Although the coal, as mined, contains 65 per cent moisture, that high content is considerably reduced in the manufacture of brikettes. This popular type of industrial and domestic fuel contains 15 pef cent moisture,and its calorific Value is three times that of the coal as mined. The approximate cost of production is 12/a ton, but to that must be added 8/a ton for freight, as well as the charges of distributors and dealers.' But apart from the individual’s aspect of the question, the scheme has a State-wide importance, which may be measured by the conditions obtaining prior to its advent. Victoria -ivas then almost totally dependent upon (outside sources for fuel for electrical and general commercial purposes, I ajid subject to every industrial interruption at the mines and on the. waterfront, added to wJiicli was the soaring price of black coal. NotVy however, Victoria has in Yallourn . a elf-contained power system and a growing independence of outside sources of fuel supply. These im : mens© and once-neglected deposits of brown coal are now energising the State, giving cheap and abundant sup-; plies of electricity for industry and the homes of the people. At the same time, they are contributing about 1400 tons of brikettes a day ; to the general fuel requirements of < the State. \

YALLOURN ACCIDENTS. The history of Yallourn has not . been without its chapter of accidents. Tho first attempt at exploiting the . deposit commercially, in 1894, enjoyed > only a brief career, •’fa.' biksli • fire de- [ vastating its works after it had been in existence but a few years. This, the Morwell Mine, which is' some short distance from the present open cut, then lay idle till 1916, when the State opened it to meet a coal shortage caused by a strike on’ the black • coal fields of Ne\v South Wiiles.- The mine was taken over by tllfe Commission in 1924, operated till 1930', but was not worked again until last year, when the disastrous floods*throughout Victoria flooded the Yallourn open cut. On that occasion, four and a-half thou sand million gallons of water, overflow from the Latrobe River, entered the latter mine. It cost a quarter of a million pounds, and many months of strenuous labour, to empty the open cut and clear the field for further operations. Adequate protection is now being made against the possibility of future inundations, by building up retaining walls of the- dumped overburden. As every precaution has always been taken to militate the risk of fire, little fear remains of any calamity causing further hindrance to the excellent progress that is being made in all branches of the’ work at Yallourn. Even the town of Yallourn is growing apace-—a Canberra on an unpretentious, smaller scale, which yet boasts of possessing ‘‘probably the Ohly hotel in the w r orld wherein every conceivable domestic facility is operated by electricity.”