Where is coal mined in Russia. Hard coal Coal deposits in the Russian Federation
When I was invited to see how coal is mined in the Amur Region, I did not immediately decide where to fly. Moscow and the Amur Region, where the coal mines of the Amursky Coal company (part of the Russian Coal holding) are located, are separated by thousands of kilometers, a six-hour flight and a six-hour time difference. I'll get enough sleep during the flight, I thought, assembled the equipment, tightened the time zones and flew off.
Today in we will learn how brown coal is mined.
When I arrived at the coal deposits and said "quarry", they immediately corrected me - not "quarry", but "cut". The cut, because the way coal is mined is such that when the waste rock is excavated, long depressions are obtained in the ground, which look like cuts. If you look at the North-Eastern section near the city of Raichikhinsk from space, you can see the following picture - stripes in the ground characteristic of coal mining.
Mining at the North-Eastern open pit (area 500 km2) has been carried out since 1932. The Erkovetsky open pit (deposit area 1250 km2) began to produce coal in 1991 for the country. The thickness of the coal seam here is 3.5 - 5 meters.
Brown coal does not lie very deep underground, therefore it is mined in an open way, which is considered safer, more economical and faster. At first glance at a piece of coal, the question arises "why is it brown if it is black?" But the specialists of Amur Coal explained to me that earlier the quality of coal was determined by the trace of a line left on a porcelain plate. Amur coal, as you understand, leaves a brown trail. 
Brown coal is less caloric than coal and anthracite. We look at Wikipedia and find out that the calorie content, that is, the heat of combustion, is the amount of heat released during the complete combustion of a mass or volume unit of a substance. Coal also has other quality parameters - moisture and sulfur content, volatile substances and ash content. All this is carefully analyzed by the departments of technological quality control of coal and coal chemistry laboratories. 
But back to the process of extracting solid fuel. Everything here, at first glance, is quite simple - a giant walking dragline excavator opens coal (takes out waste rock), and a smaller excavator loads coal into wagons. That's all! But if it were so simple, there would be no end to those who want to mine coal. In reality, coal mining requires large investments, experience and knowledge, a team of real professionals with rare skills and abilities, as well as an extensive fleet of expensive mining equipment, repair shops or factories, car depots, training centers ... I will not burden you with information about how geologists look for coal, how they get a license for mining, and let's move on to the most interesting and understandable.
I have always associated coal mining with big, no, with huge excavators. Actually, on coal mines, they immediately catch the eye because of their impressive appearance and majestic posture - arrows proudly upturned immediately make it clear that “black gold” is being mined somewhere here. 
There are abbreviations in the name of each excavator. For example, ESh 15/90 means Walking Excavator, 15 cubic meters is the volume of the bucket, and 90 meters is the length of the boom. In total, 24 such mastodons are involved in the cuts of Amursky Coal, differing in the length of the arrow and the volume of the bucket. In some buckets, the UAZ "loaf" will easily fit, and in others - the Land Cruiser SUV. 
Overburden (excavation of sandstone and clay) occurs as follows: the excavator operator lowers the bucket to the ground, then, using control levers, pulls it towards himself, filling it. 
Then the driver, by turning the base and the boom, transfers the bucket towards the dumps and pours it out. For a month, the excavator crew should open about 300 thousand cubic meters of rock. 
Where the dragline worked, mountains of waste rock remain - dumps. Therefore, the area where coal is mined, in some places resembles lunar landscapes. But only as long as coal is being mined. After working out the site, it is immediately recultivated - dumps are leveled, a fertile layer of earth is added, trees are planted. In a few years, most people will not even notice that coal mining and walking giants used to work here! 
In the meantime, the landscape of the section can be used to study geology. 
By the way, after the dragline got to the coal, and then the coal was chosen (that is, it was completely dug out in some area), the cut is backfilled with the same rock - a real waste-free production!
It was a revelation to me that walking excavators (and many other excavators too) run on electrical energy. Each mountain section of the section receives electricity from a 35/6 kV substation. 
All equipment at the cuts works around the clock and seven days a week: crews work in shifts. Small indulgences in work can be done only in the case of abnormally low temperatures - when giant buckets begin to freeze tightly to the ground.
But I will talk more about draglines later in a separate post. Keep for updates. 
Coal seams lie close to groundwater, so it must be constantly pumped out. Here you can clearly see which layer of rock was removed to get to the coal deposits. 
Well, then everything is simple - the EKG-5A excavator collects coal into a bucket and loads it immediately into wagons, which will take it in ordinary form to the consumer or to the coal sorting site. 
5 cubic meters of coal are placed in the bucket of the EKG-5A excavator, and in order to fill a standard car, 13-14 buckets of coal must be loaded into it. 
Coal is brought for sorting in order to separate it into different fractions. The local Raychikhinskaya GRES and the Blagoveshchenskaya CHPP consume fine coal, while the larger one goes to the needs of housing and communal services, in other words, for heating. 
This is what the coal sorting area looks like from the inside. If you do not know what it is and how it works, then the next action will be a surprise, as it was for me. 
This is such a "carousel" for cars. The operator from outside checks that the car has entered the car dumping platform, gives a signal, and the car, which is standing on the platform, rises and dumps the contents into the receiving hopper. 
In a few seconds, this huge mechanism (stationary lateral car dumper) puts the car in its previous position. 
An impressive sight! 
After that, coal is sent from the receiver through a complex system of conveyors through a special gallery for sorting, where it is divided into different fractions with the help of screens and a vibrating screen. Well, then into the furnace to provide electricity and heat.
That's all! Thanks for reading.
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Coal is a sedimentary rock that forms in the earth's seam. Coal is an excellent fuel. It is believed that this is the most ancient type of fuel used by our distant ancestors.
How coal is formed
For the formation of coal, a huge amount of plant matter is needed. And it is better if the plants accumulate in one place and do not have time to decompose completely. The ideal place for this is swamps. The water in them is poor in oxygen, which prevents the vital activity of bacteria.
Vegetation mass accumulates in swamps. Not having time to completely rot, it is compressed by the following soil deposits. This is how peat is obtained - the source material for coal. The next layers of soil, as it were, seal the peat in the ground. As a result, it is completely deprived of access to oxygen and water and turns into a coal seam. This process is lengthy. So, most of the modern reserves of coal were formed in the Paleozoic era, that is, more than 300 million years ago.
Characteristics and types of coal
(Brown coal)
The chemical composition of coal depends on its age.
The youngest species is brown coal. It lies at a depth of about 1 km. There is still a lot of water in it - about 43%. Contains a large amount of volatile substances. It ignites and burns well, but gives little heat.
Hard coal is a kind of "middling" in this classification. It occurs at depths up to 3 km. Since the pressure of the upper layers is greater, the water content in coal is less - about 12%, volatile substances - up to 32%, but carbon contains from 75% to 95%. It is also highly flammable, but burns better. And due to the small amount of moisture, it gives more heat.
Anthracite is an older breed. It occurs at depths of about 5 km. It has more carbon and almost no moisture. Anthracite is a solid fuel, it ignites poorly, but the specific heat of combustion is the highest - up to 7400 kcal / kg.
(Anthracite coal)
However, anthracite is not the final stage in the transformation of organic matter. When exposed to harsher conditions, coal transforms into shuntite. At higher temperatures, graphite is obtained. And when subjected to ultra-high pressure, coal turns into diamond. All these substances - from a plant to a diamond - are made of carbon, only the molecular structure is different.
In addition to the main "ingredients", the composition of coal often includes various "rocks". These are impurities that do not burn, but form slag. Contained in coal and sulfur, and its content is determined by the place of formation of coal. When burned, it reacts with oxygen and forms sulfuric acid. The less impurities in the composition of coal, the higher its grade is valued.
Coal deposit
The place of occurrence of coal is called a coal basin. Over 3.6 thousand coal basins are known in the world. Their area occupies about 15% of the earth's land area. The largest percentage of deposits of the world's coal reserves in the United States - 23%. In second place - Russia, 13%. China closes the top three leading countries - 11%. The largest coal deposits in the world are located in the USA. This is the Appalachian coal basin, whose reserves exceed 1600 billion tons.
In Russia, the largest coal basin is Kuznetsk, in the Kemerovo region. The reserves of Kuzbass amount to 640 billion tons.
The development of deposits in Yakutia (Elginskoye) and in Tyva (Elegestskoye) is promising.
Coal mining
Depending on the depth of the coal, either a closed mining method or an open one is used.
Closed, or underground mining method. For this method, mine shafts and adits are built. Mine shafts are built if the depth of coal is 45 meters or more. A horizontal tunnel leads from it - an adit.
There are 2 closed mining systems: room and pillar mining and longwall mining. The first system is less economical. It is used only in cases where the discovered layers are thick. The second system is much safer and more practical. It allows you to extract up to 80% of the rock and evenly deliver coal to the surface.
The open method is used when the coal is shallow. To begin with, an analysis of the hardness of the soil is carried out, the degree of soil weathering and the layering of the covering layer are ascertained. If the ground above the coal seams is soft, the use of bulldozers and scrapers is sufficient. If the upper layer is thick, then excavators and draglines are brought in. A thick layer of hard rock lying above the coal is blown up.
The use of coal
The area of use of coal is simply huge.
Sulfur, vanadium, germanium, zinc, and lead are extracted from coal.
Coal itself is an excellent fuel.
It is used in metallurgy for iron smelting, in the production of iron, steel.
The ash obtained after burning coal is used in the production of building materials.
From coal, after its special processing, benzene and xylene are obtained, which are used in the production of varnishes, paints, solvents, and linoleum.
By liquefying coal, a first-class liquid fuel is obtained.
Coal is the raw material for producing graphite. As well as naphthalene and a number of aromatic compounds.
As a result of the chemical processing of coal, more than 400 types of industrial products are currently obtained.
Since I live in the land of miners, I could not help but be interested in the methods of extracting this mineral, which, by the way, are not so many. Taking this opportunity, I will try to briefly talk about the pros and cons of each of them.
Coal mining: mine method
Mining in this way provides a huge advantage, since the most valuable fuels lie at great depths. At the same time, coal practically does not contain waste rocks, which cannot be said about the open method, but about it a little later. So, in order to get to the deposits, they drill deep vertical tunnels. As soon as a reservoir is discovered, its horizontal development begins. Sometimes the depth reaches 1.5 km, for example, the Gvardeiskaya mine, which is located in the Donbass. However, this method has many disadvantages:
- the threat of flooding;
- since methane is an eternal companion of coal seams, this is fraught with suffocation of workers or undermining;
- the greater the depth, the higher the temperature, which means that there is a risk to people and equipment.
In the world, about 40% of world reserves are mined in this way.
Coal mining: open pit or quarry
In this case, there is no need not only for expensive drilling, but also for the construction of a number of ground communications. The bottom line is to undermine the waste rock, and then huge excavators, crushers and trucks come into play, which process the rock and take it to the dumps. This method carries less danger, but still some risks are associated with it. This is the threat of an unscheduled explosion, and the poisoning of workers with exhaust, and careless handling of hazardous equipment.
Hydraulic coal mining
In principle, this is the same mine, but there is one feature: the transportation of the fossil is carried out by a jet of water under enormous pressure. It turns out that groundwater is a headache for miners, it works for their benefit. Today, this method is considered one of the best, as it replaces the labor-intensive process of transportation. The disadvantages include the dependence of production on the type of rock, and the constant contact of water with the equipment.
coal called sedimentary rock formed during the decomposition of plant remains (tree ferns, horsetails and club mosses, as well as the first gymnosperms). The main reserves of hard coal currently mined were formed during the Paleozoic period, about 300-350 million years ago. Coal has been mined for several centuries and is one of the most important minerals. Used as solid fuel.
Coal consists of a mixture of high-molecular aromatic compounds (mainly carbon), as well as water and volatile substances with a small amount of impurities. Depending on the composition of coal, the amount of heat released during its combustion, as well as the amount of ash formed, also changes. The value of coal and its deposits depends on this ratio.
For the formation of a mineral, it was also necessary to fulfill the following condition: rotting plant material had to accumulate faster than its decomposition occurred. That is why coal was formed mainly on ancient peatlands, where carbon compounds accumulated, and there was practically no access to oxygen. The source material for the emergence of coal is, in fact, peat itself, which was also used as a fuel for some time. Coal, on the other hand, was formed if peat layers were under other sediments. At the same time, peat was compressed, losing water as a result of which coal was formed.
Coal occurs when peat layers occur at a considerable depth, usually more than 3 km. At greater depths, anthracite is formed - the highest grade of hard coal. However, this does not mean that all coal deposits are located at great depths. Over time, under the influence of tectonic processes of various directions, some layers experienced uplift, as a result of which they turned out to be closer to the surface.
The method of coal mining also depends on the depth at which coal-bearing deposits are located. If coal lies at a depth of up to 100 meters, then mining is usually carried out in an open way. This is the name of the removal of the top above the deposit, in which the mineral is on the surface. For mining from great depths, the mine method is used, in which access to is carried out through the creation of special underground passages - mines. The deepest coal mines in Russia are about 1,200 meters below the surface.
The largest coal deposits in Russia
Elga field (Sakha)
This coal deposit, located in the south-east of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), 415 km east of the city of Neryungri, is the most promising for open-pit mining. The deposit area is 246 km2. The deposit is a gently sloping asymmetric fold.
The deposits of the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous are coal-bearing. The main coal seams are located in the deposits of the Neryungri (6 seams, 0.7-17 m thick) and Undyktan (18 seams, also 0.7-17 m thick) formations.
The coals here are mostly semi-glossy with a very high content of the most valuable component - vitrinite (78-98%), medium and high ash, low sulfur, low phosphorus, good sintering, with a high calorific value. Elga coal can be enriched using a special technology, which will make it possible to obtain a product of a higher quality that meets international standards. Powerful flat coal seams are covered with deposits of small thickness, which is very important for open pit mining.
Elegest deposit (Tuva)
Located in the Republic of Tuva. This field has reserves of about 20 billion tons. Most of the reserves (about 80%) are located in a single layer 6.4 m thick. The development of this deposit is currently ongoing, so coal mining here should reach its maximum capacity around 2012.
Large deposits of coal (the area of which is thousands of km2) are called coal basins. Typically, such deposits are located in some large tectonic structure (for example, a trough). However, not all deposits located close to each other are usually combined into basins, and sometimes they are considered as separate deposits. This usually happens according to historically established ideas (deposits were discovered in different periods).
Minusinsk coal basin is located in the Republic of Khakassia. Coal mining began here in 1904. The largest deposits include Chernogorskoye and Izykhskoye. According to geologists, the coal reserves in this area amount to 2.7 billion tons. Stone long-flame coals with a high calorific value predominate in the basin. The coals are classified as medium ash. The maximum ash content is typical for the coals of the Izykh deposit, the minimum - for the coals of the Beyskoye deposit. Coal mining in the basin is carried out in different ways: there are both cuts and mines.
Kuznetsk coal basin (Kuzbass) is one of the largest coal deposits in the world. Kuzbass is located in the south in a shallow basin between the mountain ranges, Mountain Shoria and. This is the territory of the Kemerovo region. The abbreviation "Kuzbass" is the second name of the region. The first deposit in the Kemerovo region was discovered back in 1721, and in 1842 the term "Kuznetsk coal basin" was introduced by the geologist Chikhachev.
Mining here is also carried out in different ways. There are 58 mines and more than 30 cuts on the territory of the basin. In terms of quality, "" coals are diverse and are among the best coals.
The coal-bearing stratum of the Kuznetsk coal basin consists of approximately 260 coal seams of various thicknesses, unevenly distributed along the section. The predominant thickness of coal seams is from 1.3 to 4.0 m, but there are also thicker seams of 9-15 and even 20 m, and in some places up to 30 m.
The maximum depth of coal mines does not exceed 500 m (average depth is about 200 m). The average thickness of the developed coal seams is 2.1 m, but up to 25% of mine coal production falls on seams over 6.5 m.
Despite the fact that alternative energy sources are being increasingly used today, coal mining is an important industry. One of the most important areas of application of this type of fuel is the operation of power plants. Coal deposits are located in various countries of the world, and 50 of them are active.
World coal deposits
The largest amount of coal is mined in the United States in deposits in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, in Illinois and Alabama, in Colorado, Wyoming and Texas. It produces hard and brown coal, as well as anthracites. The second place in the extraction of these minerals is occupied by Russia.
In third place in coal production is China. The largest Chinese deposits are located in the Shanxing coal basin, in the Great Chinese Plain, Datong, Yangtze, etc. A lot of coal is also mined in Australia - in the states of Queensland and New South Wales, near the city of Newcastle. India is a major coal producer, and the deposits are located in the northeast of the country.
Hard and brown coal has been mined in the Saar and Saxony, Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg deposits in Germany for more than 150 years. There are three coal basins in Ukraine: Dnieper, Donetsk, Lvov-Volyn. Anthracites, gas coal and coking coal are mined here. Sufficiently large-scale coal deposits are located in Canada and Uzbekistan, Colombia and Turkey, North Korea and Thailand, Kazakhstan and Poland, the Czech Republic and South Africa.
Coal deposits in Russia
One third of the world's coal reserves are located on the territory of the Russian Federation. The largest number of deposits is located in the eastern part of the country, in Siberia. The largest Russian coal deposits are as follows:
- Kuznetsk - a significant part of the basin lies in the Kemerovo region, where about 80% of coking and 56% of hard coal are mined;
- Kansk-Achinsk basin - 12% of brown coal is mined;
- Tunguska basin - located in part of Eastern Siberia, anthracites, brown and hard coal are mined;
- The Pechora basin is rich in coking coal;
- The Irkutsk-Cheremkhovo basin is a source of coal for Irkutsk enterprises.
Coal mining is a very promising sector of the economy today. Experts say that humanity consumes coal too intensively, so there is a threat that the world's reserves may soon be used up, but in some countries there are significant reserves of this mineral. Its consumption depends on the application, and if you reduce the consumption of coal, it will last for a longer time.
