Changing Geological and Mining Conditions in Hard Coal Mines in Poland as Mining Activities Progress

Abstract

This publication presents the research aimed at showing the change hard coal mining conditions in Poland. In total 499 longwalls in 7 coal mines were analysed, including 240 longwalls that were mined in the period of 2010 to 2021 and 259 longwalls scheduled for exploitation in the years 2022 to 2030. It has been shown that the geological and mining conditions deteriorate as mining operations progress. In the case of underground mining, the occurring natural hazards result in increases in technical problems and in the cost of coal production, and consequently affects the assessment of the economic efficiency of mining plants.

Gospodarka Surowcami Mineralnymi - Mineral Resources Management

“…The first part of the work was devoted to establishing the relationships between longwall operational costs, their production outputs and geological and mining conditions (factors) represented by the indicator of technical nuisance (wUe, wUt). The aggregated impact of natural hazards, coal seams specification and longwall technical parameters -so called technical nuisance -was determined with use of an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), more preciously described in the following publications (Sobczyk 2008;Sobczyk and Kopacz 2018). Statistical models were built on the past production performance of five polish coal mines, than empirically tested.…”

“…Applying the hierarchical approach proposed by Sobczyk (Sobczyk and Kopacz 2018), geological and mining conditions may be divided into four groups of factors which influence the general level of mining nuisance, namely: natural hazards, coal seam parameters, mining (technical) parameters, environmental factors. natural factors and seam parameters are connected with the geology and structure of hard coal deposits.…”

“…The detailed methodology for assessing the nuisance of geological and mining conditions for exploitation has been presented in the papers of (Sobczyk 2008;Sobczyk and Kopacz 2018).…”

“…This publication belongs to the line of research conducted by the authors, documented, among others, in (Sobczyk 2008;Sobczyk and Kopacz 2018). It is an attempt to identify the relationship between some geological and mining parameters and longwall cost levels, or the theoretical coal net output defined for them.…”

The use of the open-source software QGIS for the assessment of the risk caused by mining the longwall face to buildings on the ground surface

“…QGIS offers a wide range of tools and plugins that can be tailored to specific risk assessment needs [8,9]. With its help it is possible to develop custom workflows and integrate third-party plugins to enhance functionality, making it adaptable to different risk scenarios [10].…”