CHINESE-BACKED mining company Yancoal is laying off 45 people from its Duralie open-cut mine, near Gloucester.
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Yancoal spokesperson James Rickards confirmed the layoffs, saying the mine employed about 140 people at the moment.
Mr Rickards said the company had called for voluntary redundancies and hoped that few if any of the positions to go would be forced retrenchments.
Yancoal, like a number of coal companies, has recorded substantial financial losses in recent years but Mr Rickards said the Duralie layoffs were due to geological problems, rather than anything caused by coal prices.
He said continuing geological problems at Duralie had led the company to redesign and restructure its operation, an announcement that was made to the workforce last month.
The restructure involved moving from two excavating machines to one, and cutting shift lengths from 10 hours and 12 hours to 8.4 hours. Weekend work would also cease, returning to a five-day operating roster.
Yancoal runs a roster of mines in NSW and Queensland, with its Donaldson mine put on care and maintenance in May, and most of the workforce moved to the Austar and Ashton mines.
Mr Rickards said Yancoal had laid off about 275 employees, or some 10 per cent of its workforce, since the decline in the coal industry took hold.
He said coal was no longer being mined from Yancoal’s second Gloucester operation, the Stratford open-cut, but he confirmed that Yancoal had struck a commercial arrangement with the company proposing the Rocky Hill open-cut, which is on public display until October 14 with the NSW Department of Planning.
This arrangement would allow Gloucester Resources, the company proposing Rocky Hill, to use the Stratford coal washery and rail-loading facilities to move its coal.
Initial plans for Rocky Hill were lodged with the government in 2012 but the process was put on hold last year. Under the revised plans, Rocky Hill would produce 21 million tonnes of coal over 16 years, with a maximum production of two million tonnes a year.
Yancoal has approval to extend the life of its Stratford mine until 2025 but related plans on display with the government, also until October 14, propose to extend this until 2028 as one of a number of requested changes.
The Stratford washery would handle up to 5.6 million tonnes a year from Stratford, Rocky Hill and Duralie.
The Rocky Hill lease is within a couple of kilometres of the Gloucester township, and activists and many of the town’s residents are opposed to its existence. Stratford sits south of Rocky Hill, with Duralie further south again.
