Currently, in developing the most inclined and steep coal deposits in the Central and Northern Kuzbass (Western Siberia, Russia), the deeping longitudinal open pit mining method is used with overburden rock moved to external dumps using transport technology. One of the ways to reduce the rate of land withdrawal while reducing development costs by shortening the distance of overburden movement is to use block lateral mining method with overburden storage in the worked out space. The paper emphasizes that well-known technological solutions consider quarry fields untouched by mining, or in the process of exploitation, so the block mining procedure is using fragmentally along with moving overburden by dump trucks. Internal dumping, as an element of land preservation, has not been generally considered to date. This is a deterrent to the implementation of resource-saving mining technologies, both in design and mining practice.

Today, up to two-thirds of the world’s minerals are mined in an open, more economical way. However, at the same time, billions of tons of overburden are extracted, which are piled in the dumps, where they are polluted, lose their value and, in addition, reduce the quality of the environment. The possibility of industrial use of various rocks of from quarry field characterizes the complexity of minerals extracted by surface mining. Currently, there are no clear criteria for determining the size of blocks when designing enterprises for open pit mining. In most cases, when designing open pit mines, a quarry field is conventionally divided into several blocks, which does not always ensure the optimal production capacity of the mining enterprise due to the uneven distribution of reserves in the block contours. Because of that, during the transition from one block to another, a decrease in the production capacity of the enterprise can be noted. To avoid productivity decreasing, the precise analysis of the block parameters must be performed.