All of Teck’s coal mines are conventional open-pit operations and are designed to operate on a continuous basis, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

FRO currently produces coal using open-pit coal mining methods, with primary waste stripping and coal mining completed by shovels and rear dump haul trucks.

Waste is blasted using large diameter blast-hole drills. The shot overburden/interburden is dumped into the waste haul trucks by electric shovels. Mine waste is backfilled into the advancing mining pit where practical and to external dumps as required to release adequate ROM coal to meet annual production targets. Front-end loaders and bulldozers are used to move coal to piles on the mined benches; coal haul trucks later haul coal to the breaker for delivery to the coal processing plant.

The current mining fleet is comprised of the following equipment.

• Caterpillar 994 (2)
• Letourneau 1850 (3)
• Letourneau 1400 (1)
• Marion 301 shovel
• Marion 351 shovel
• P & H 4100 A shovel
• P & H 4100 XPB shovels (2)
• P & H 4100 XPC shovel (2)
• Production drills (5)
• Waste/coal haul fleet (63)
• Bulldozers
• Graders
• Backhoes
• Scrapers
• Water trucks

Fording River Operation produces all products sized to -2 inches using standard coal processing methods of heavy media cyclones for coarse coal, and cyclones and froth flotation for fines processing.

ROM coal from pits and stockpiles passes through a rotary breaker and plant feeders. After sizing to 38 mm (1.5 inches), the raw coal is screened to 0.75 mm, with +0.75 mm coal feeding heavy medium cyclones, with the product screened to +0.5 mm, centrifuged and sent to the thermal dryer. Coal sized at -0.75 mm enters a fine coal circuit that includes water only cyclones, spirals, sieve bends, froth flotation cells, thickeners, centrifuges, and the thermal dryer. Coarse rejects are directed to a bin for loading into haul trucks. Spiral rejects are dewatered and sent with coarse rejects, with screen underflow reporting to tailings ponds. Flotation rejects are split for either thickening, filtering and disposal with coarse rejects, or directed to the tailings ponds.