Usibelli Coal has been granted permission to open its new coal mine in Canada. The Department of Natural Resources gave the company permits to open a new pit mine in the north east of Healy at the Jumbo Dome Mine.
The new mine is located six miles away from the Two Bulls Mine which Usibelli Coal has mined for the last decade. The two mines are situated on the same coal seam and this will help to keep the production costs low as per the company officials.
Fred Wallis the vice president of engineering at Usibelli Coal said that they had identified a bunch of different areas that had coal in them, but the big thing was access into these areas, close to the infrastructure that they had in place. He said that they had to find the correct one so they did not have to build a huge long road to get to it, and power lines and all of that. Everything had to go onto the rail system here, so the closer the better.
The new mine is likely to produce between 80 million to 90 million tons of coal over the next 30 years. This would give the company an extra 3 million tons of coal per year. The additional coal from the Jumbo Dome Mine will bring up the annual production capacity of the company by 50%.
Mr Wallis said that the Usibelli Coal mining company is developing the Jumbo Dome Mine for two reasons. The first was that it expected to export nearly 1 million tons of coal to countries such as Japan, Korea and Chile annually. The second was that the mine had enough reserves to see them through the long time it takes to get permits going for future mining projects.