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Show 46 Energy Edition, January, U.S. Bureau Is 1983 i of Mines study economic slump a blessing A recent study by two analysts of the U.S. Bureau of Mines is reviewed in this article in The Australian of Sydney by Nicholas Rothwell. THE mining industry moves into the 1980s in the hold of a crippling depression that has ravaged giant companies the world over. But the disastrous economic outlook may well prove a blessing in disguise for those exploration and development companies capable of exploiting the necessity for overhaul complete and modernisation. Miners have relied for the best part of a century on standard technologies for processing, extraction and while other sectors of business have kept pace with scientific innovation. The basic point is that development in mining has been largely evolutionary, founded on established processes, rather than revolutionary. The sheer size of the leading companies has guaranteed them supremacy in the marketplace, often inhibiting the more innovative or adventurous small companies from developing new processes, cleaner and more economic methods of ore recovery, and more automated production systems. In this last element of the lies automation equation the potential solution. the While steel, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing industries have continuously increased their profitability, mining has only recently dramatic matched the improvements in performance made overall possible by new technology. In part because of this lack of development in the actual processes of mining, rather United States than elsewhere, because of the diminishing availability of high-grad- a highly mechanised mining sector could take between 10 and 20 years. The study, by Messrs Robert Marovelli and John Kahrnak, calls attention to innovations made in the post-wperiod which have allowed the mining sector to provide 80 percent of US domestic needs with the work of less than a hundredth of the workforce. The US mining industry is largely dominated by coal, which has been marked by a rapid increase in output per unit of labor between 1950 and 1970, but is now troubled by a fall in the rate of imar in exploration or metallurgy, the mining sector now faces a need to haul itself into the age of provement. The amount of coal produced automated operations. The need is more acute in the in the US is around 800 million than ground. Emphasis has shifted from to surface undergound operations, which are less safe and less productive, being labor. Two analysts for the US Bureau of Mines have recently full-sca- le underground with mining, phased out. from coal production, percent of all metallic ores and 75 percent of all crude ores come from surface mines, according to Aside 95 non-metal- lic Bureau of Mines figures. In coal mining, the industry workforce has more than halved in the past 60 years while total production has increased significantly. the Only 136,000 of 208,000 strong mining workforce are employed in underground and the surface mining, the improvements mining component of the industry yields more than 60 percent of the output. Evidence Worker productivity has jumped dramatically over the same period, from 950 tons a man year to 3,700 tons but technology. In this sense, the mining sector has remained essentially conservative, trusting in established patterns rather than experimenting with new means of extraction and processing. The Bureau of Mines report also provides clear evidence that the improvements in coal mine output achieved in the earlier years of this century, valuable though incremental in nature, have not been continued in the 1970s. The reasons for the drop in productivity are unclear but several factors are evident, and many of these can be traced in other countries such as Australia, which also possesses enormous coal reserves. . The most important problems are related to ex- ( HIGH BTU, LOW SULFUR , LOW ASH COAL. MINED EFFICIENTLY BY LONGWALLS, v . , v sMalT-iV' WE STAND READY TO - V N ; SUPPLY YOUR COAL NEEDS. ' As r-- -- ' . i SUNNYSIDE MINES P.O. BOX D SUNNYSIDE , UTAH 84539 (801) 888-442- 1 N Vw, s' . v, ' I .'I .?!' '' ' iV 'V r w y j recorded generally refinements of established rather than techniques, quantum leaps in basic SUNNYSIDE MINES: TRANSPORTED BY UNIT TRAINS. been are still in the have reserves reserves and the rising costs of prepared an authoritative survey of the problem, estimating that a switchover to disguise? year, and vast tons every e in Continued on Page 47) |