Thiess Pty Ltd has been awarded a six-year AU$ 1.3 billion contract to extend mining operations at Peabody Energy Australia’s Burton coal mine in the Bowen basin, Queensland, Australia. The company has operated the mine for the past 14 years and this contract will prolong the life of mine until 2016.
Thiess started operations at Burton in 1996 and has mined close to 50 million t of hard coking coal and thermal coal from various pits within the 45 km project site for export to a number of international markets including Asia, Europe, India and South America.
The new contract will allow Thiess to maintain Burton’s production capacity of over 2.5 million tpa. Operations will return to the original mining area started in 1996, with high quality coal mined to a depth of up to 240 m, making it the deepest opencast operation in the Bowen basin.
The Burton mine extension will employ more than 500 people and will require an additional Liebherr R9800 – one of the world’s largest mining backhoe excavators – to work in tandem with the first excavator, which has been operating at Burton for nearly a year. A fleet of Caterpillar 797 trucks, the largest in the Cat range, will service the two big excavators.