Increasing underground coal mine productivity through a training program

摘要

Over the last two years, the State of Illinois supported an underground miner productivity training grant through the Illinois Clean Coal Institute. The main goal of this grant was to provide training to underground coal mines in Illinois in an effort to increase mine productivity. It was hoped that by providing training to mine personnel on how to make small changes to cyclic procedures, productivity increases would come at no additional cost to the mines. Project staff conducted site walkthroughs and time studies underground at seven different mines for four coal companies. The focus of the visits was the continuous miner cycle as all the underground mines in Illinois use a continuous miner for production or longwall development. Data from the time studies were entered into a spreadsheet that modeled mine productivity. Variables were changed in the models to predict productivity increases that could be achieved by making changes suggested and to show sensitivity of the variables on the productivity. The objective was to help the operations quantify the benefits of the specific changes so they could make more informed decisions and focus their attention on the most critical issues. The findings from the walkthroughs and mine models were incorporated into a miner productivity training presentation. Training sessions were provided to mine management and frontline supervisors at five mines and additionally, to hourly workers at one mine. In all, productivity increases ranging from 10 percent to 34 percent were suggested at each mine by project staff at no additional production cost to the mines. If fully adopted, productivity from these mines would increase by an estimated 2 million clean tons of coal per year, resulting in an additional 50 million dollars in coal sales from these five mines. Each mine visited had its specific challenges, but several had common issues. The issues that kept recurring were not fully utilizing haulage capacity, mining out of sequence, and not taking the longest cut possible. To illustrate the sensitivity of the productivity to these variables in a continuous miner production panel, a hypothetical nine-entry, room-and-pillar mining plan was created and analyzed using a mine-modeling spreadsheet. Results from the mine models are presented along with recommendations for possible changes to increase productivity.