Post by smshogun on Mar 27, 2014 13:42:04 GMT -5
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.