Coal Preparation Priorities
The coal industry faces a range of high level sustainable development issues which,
in the context of coal preparation research, translate to:
- Occupational health, safety and environmental improvements.
- Energy and water efficiency and usage improvements.
- Optimal resource/reserve recovery.
- Maximise the opportunities of the coal industry to market conditions.
Occupational health and safety is paramount and all efforts must be made to ensure
continued improvement. Rejects disposal and tailings dams are of particular interest,
from both environmental and water loss perspectives, noting that proposals for final
rehabilitation of tailings dams should be directed to the open cut committee.
Proposals offering practical and commercially viable outcomes that can be implemented
relatively quickly to provide ongoing benefits are especially encouraged. Topics
of specific interest are listed below in four broad themes. Consideration will also
be given to projects addressing the traditional areas of coal preparation improvement,
such as efficiency optimisation, moisture reduction and cost reduction.
GROWTH
- Plant design to maximise coal product value in use.
- Reduced capital costs and construction times for new plants/expansions.
- Simplified plant flow sheet circuits to improve performance and efficiency.
- Increased yield and tonnage throughput potential for existing plants; understand
tipping points as feed rates are increased.
- Reduction of unit costs through economy of scale, improved throughput rates, increased
availability and/or improved efficiency.
- Lower cost alternatives to flotation for fines circuits that do not rely on surface
chemistry.
- Better correlations to obtain plant design parameters from bore cores, especially
slim cores, to improve the envelope for design.
- Improved prediction of plant feed sizing from bore core breakage analysis.
- Improved dewatering capacity at low capital cost.
- Increased equipment availability - improve equipment that suffers the most maintenance
downtime.
- Reduced fines in plant feed via improved mining methods and techniques, eg, minimised
dozer activity.
METALLURGICAL EFFICIENCY
- Improved fines size separation efficiency, identifying performance and process constraints.
- Improved circuit design; optimising cut-points to individual unit operations.
- Improved understanding of treatment of clays and their impact on process efficiency.
- Improved and comprehensive product accounting and reconciliation.
- Incorporation of real maintenance impacts on process efficiency determination.
- Improved product dewatering, including maximised solids capture and operating performance.
- New approaches to achieving process efficiency improvements and measuring capability.
- Options for feed pretreatment including clays.
OPERATOR ASSIST
Appropriate plant design, simplification and automation will reduce the amount of
operator time spent on non-value adding tasks, enabling the workforce to expend
maximum time on activities beneficial to the process. Suggested topics include:
- More and better sensors for critical plant performance parameters.
- Remote monitoring and process control capability.
- Autonomous equipment.
- Better job/task design and equipment layout.
- Development of e-learning and computer-assisted learning tools.
- Forecast future skill sets and technology needs.
- Online conditioning monitoring.
SUSTAINABILITY
- Improved health and safety in coal preparation operations.
- Improve energy efficiency.
- Reduce environmental impacts and reduce greenhouse gas footprint:
- Improved reject and tailings management.
- Alternatives to existing mechanical dewatering technology and tailings dams.
- Stabilising tailings dams with a high proportion of clay minerals.
- Reduce water consumption and increase water recycling.
- Effect of dissolved salt build up on plant, product quality and separation processes.
- Noise and dust minimisation.
- Recovery of coal values from plant rejects and tailing dams
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