Coal Power Being Assessed

[smshogun]

At the weekend I went to a mates farm and was surprised to see a portable drill rig taking sample cores from areas around his land so obviously I asked what it was about and he told me they were taking core samples and paying him very well, but they only claimed it was for environmental reasons.

After going to the drill rig I noticed it was one we designed and developed for shallow core sampling, and recognised one of the operators as a former workmate from the mining industry who gave some valuable information, he was under instructions not to give anything away, but gave me enough to piece it together as he has known me for a long time.

It transpires that they are doing a series of test drills around the country for shallow coal seams, and from what he intimated it was for future assessment of shallow coal reserves to plot a countrywide map of these shallow reserves for future outcrop mining, and he was guaranteed enough work drilling until 2020 which meant a lot of drilling. He claimed he was working on one site when the machine had a serious fault and had to have a mobile plant fitter come out and the fitter said they were snowed under and he had worked on these machines in all parts of the Midlands, South Yorkshire, Kent, and South Wales, so now we have four clearly defined areas for drilling operations.

Some other interesting comments were made and these were that officially they were not looking for coal seams as they were looking for coal content in old mining dirt hills and outcrop areas which set me thinking as these rigs can only bore to a depth of 250 metres.

Back in the late 80's, early 90's there was something called Project Bretby Separator in which old muck from dirt hills was fed through this separator and it extracted fine flakes of coal from dirt, I have personally seen three scaled down prototype units in operation on BC prep plants for evaluation in separating coal flakes from dirt. From memory it was a very efficient separator and would extract coal flakes from naked to the human eye to pieces about the size of a 2p piece, is this what's happening? or am I just way off beam.

[Wheldale]

Maybe the government are looking for a quick fix if we cannot guarantee gas supplies? That is of course if there are any coal power stations still open?? The Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield is built on top of 20 million tonnes of coal. British Coal couldn't get to it fast enough apparently, that would have been some opencast mine!

I remember reading years ago, I think it was at Allerton Bywater, the flake separator was used going through the old muck stack, produced some good results. Indeed when Budge first took over at Hatfield he was going through the tip to a tune of 3000 tonnes a week of coal.

[andyexplorer]

They are actually taking spoil from a large spoil tip in Yorkshire near to Ferrybridge power station
Lots of activity and many machines

[Wheldale]

Andy,

Is that the old Prince of Wales tip your talking about?

[tygwyn]

Would`nt the limit of these drill rigs rule out the Kent coalfield at its depth?

[smshogun]

How? dirt hills and slag heaps were traditionally capped with clay and covered in earth, they were never that high so a short reach drill rig is all that is required.

[tygwyn]

It was your mention of Shallow Coal Reserves in your opening post incurred my mention of ruling Kent out.

[smshogun]

Many shallow coal seams form under dirt hills when the smaller flakes they are after settle and form thin seams or veins of coal.