COAL2006 7th UNDERGROUND COAL OPERATORS CONFERENCE
University of Wollongong July 6 to 7, 2006 McKinnon Building (67) Click (venue location) Sustainable Coal Mine Development

COAL2006 will be held over two days in July 2006 at the University of Wollongong. The Conference is organised by Illawarra Branch of The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, jointly with The University of Wollongong, and Mine Managers Association of Australia.

The theme of COAL2006 is Sustainable Coal Mine Development. The Conference will review progress in addressing the technical constraints that apply to the development of both surface and underground coal mines.

In surface mining, the issues of environmental impact (noise and dust) and the stability of deep excavations remain crucial to the planning of successful operations. In common with longwall operations, more structural disturbed coal deposits are being mined and this introduces an additional set of stability and operational problems.

In the underground sector, the improvements in longwall performance continue to place demands on roadway development and the unsolved “development constraint”. Are their evolutional or revolutionary changes in the way roadway development is managed or is the answer wider longwalls? If longwall is to be the dominant underground method, there will need to be greater attention to how to extract structurally disturbed coal. Particularly in NSW there is a need to re-examine the subsidence impact of longwall mining.

The conference sponsors include, BHPBilliton –Illawarra Coal, Gujarat NRE Mines of Wollongong, and Minova International of Nowra

A 1-day short course on subsidence prediction and visualisation will be conducted on Wednesday July 5. This short course will review the state of the art in subsidence prediction with the aim of providing participants the skills to a produce cross sections and contour plans of subsidence deformations and an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the methods.

	Mine Managers Association of Australia