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Introduction:
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Processing Coal:When coal is being processed it goes through a series of steps. These steps include cleaning to remove natural impurities, sorting into size groups and drying to remove moisture. This is very important because it ensures that customers are getting high quality coal. Breaker:After being thrown into the truck my coal friends and I were taken on a very bumpy ride. We were transported several kilometres by truck and then dumped into a hopper. The hopper feeds the coal into a building that has a machine called a rotary breaker. The breaker breaks the coal into smaller pieces and removes the large rocks. I felt very lucky to be a small piece of coal that could just slide through the breaker and onto a conveyor. Some of my friends weren’t so lucky though, and were broken into smaller pieces of coal or thrown out just because they were made of rock. From the breaker I was transported along an overland conveyor to the wash plant. In the plant, the coal was screened into 3 or 4 separate size categories. Each size category went through a different washing process using gravity, cyclones or flotation. All of the coal had to be washed to get rid of any non-carbon material that might be stuck to it.
The wash plant is an example of the advanced technology used in the mines. A computerized Distributed Control System (DCS) controls the coal cleaning process. One employee can control nearly everything that happens in the huge wash plant. This makes things run much more efficiently and controls the quality of the coal, making sure that customers are always happy. After the coal has been cleaned, the left over non-carbon material is divided into 2 categories: dry coarse rejects and fine wet tailings. Once the dirt had been washed off of me I never saw it again. I was told that the larger coarser material was moved to the spoils with the rest of the waste rock, and the smaller wet tailings were dumped and stored in a large pond called a tailings pond. Because tailing are heavier than water, they fall to the bottom of the tailings pond. Once separated from the tailings, the water is recycled to the wash plant so it can be used again.
Coal-fired dryer:The washed coal is taken to an automated thermal dryer that removes any extra moisture. The dryer heats the coal so that any moisture can escape as steam. Loading the coal: I had just enough time to warm up my toes in the dryer when another conveyor took me to the load-out facility. The load-out facility is where the coal goes so that it can be loaded onto the trains. This building, called a silo, can hold up to 15, 000 tonnes of cleaned coal. The load-out facility is built right over the train tracks, allowing trains to pass underneath and load their cars full of coal without having to stop. A computerized system is used to weigh each train car while it is still in motion. The computer controls the amount of coal added to the car. Using this advanced system, a 112-car train takes under three hours to load with 11, 400 tonnes of coal. |
Introduction | Tumbler Ridge | The Caufield Brothers | Japan Markets | Coal Mining and the Environment | Mining Technology | From the Mines to the Ports
© MM Fernie & District Historical Society.
