Oaky Creek lies in the central Bowen Basin, next to Rio Tinto’s Kestrel mine. The Bowen Basin contains the largest coal reserve in Australia. This major coalproducing region contains one of the world’s largest deposits of bituminous coal. The Basin contains much of the known Permian coal resources in Queensland including virtually the entire known mineable prime coking coal. The Bowen Basin covers an area of over 60,000 square kilometres in Central Queensland running from Collinsville to Theodore.

The foreland, Early Permian to Middle Triassic Bowen Basin of eastern Queensland occupies about 160,000 km2, the southern half of which is covered by the Surat Basin. It has a maximum sediment thickness of about 10,000 metres concentrated in two N trending depocentres, the Taroom Trough to the east and the Denison Trough to the west. Deposition in the basin commenced during an Early Permian extensional phase, with fluvial and lacustrine sediments and volcanics being deposited in a series of half-graben in the east while in the west a thick succession of coals and nonmarine clastics.

Following rifting there was a thermal subsidence phase extending from the mid Early to Late Permian, during which a basin-wide transgression allowed deposition of deltaic and shallow marine, predominantly clastic sediments as well as extensive coal measures. Foreland loading of the basin spread from east to west during the Late Permian, resulting in accelerated subsidence, which al ........

The underground operations are modern, state of the art longwall operations with associated developmental works.

Oaky Creek North was developed as a major longwall mine and is generally a larger scale operation than the Oaky No 1 mine, thicker seams, wider longwall blocks and bigger more powerful equipment. In both mines continuous miners develop the blocks for longwall extraction, maintaining minimum developed longwall inventories of at least two blocks at all times. The underground mines at the Oaky Creek have optimum working conditions with a stable roof, floor and coalface and an above average seam thickness.

The Oaky Creek mine produces premium quality, medium volatile coking coal.

On September 30, 2021, Glencore begun using its autonomous longwall technology at the Oaky Creek underground metallurgical coal mine in Queensland following successful trials.

Developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Centre for Advanced Technologies, the underground longwall uses first-of-its-kind ExScan technology enabling the operation to be fully automated.

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