Brown Coal

Content maintained by Mike Huleatt

• Brown Coal
• Resources
• Accessible EDR
• JORC Reserves
• Exploration
• Production
• World Ranking
• Industry Development

Brown coal, also called lignite, is a low rank, high moisture content coal which is used mainly to generate electricity. In Australia brown coal occurrences are known in all States and are Tertiary in age (15 to 50 million years old). The Gippsland Basin in Victoria contains a substantial world class deposit of brown coal with seams up to 330 metres thick. In Australia brown coal is mined only in Victoria only where the Anglesea, Loy Yang, Yallourn and Hazelwood open-cut mines supply coal to nearby power stations. Brown coal is mined also at Maddingley to produce a fertiliser product. Other products produced from Victorian brown coal are briquettes for industrial and domestic heating and low ash and low sulphur char products.

Recoverable Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR) for 2010 totalled 39 254 million tonnes (Mt) which was a 5.8% increase over the 2009 estimate. The growth was due to some resource growth but mainly from reallocation from other resource categories. Recoverable Paramarginal Demonstrated Resources (PDR) fell by just over 5% to 37 045Mt and Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) fell by 2% to 15 942Mt. Recoverable Inferred Resources fell by almost 6% to 95 155Mt. Victoria accounted for 96% of Australia's identified resources of brown coal. All EDR is located in Victoria and about 93% of the total EDR is located in the Latrobe Valley.

Approximately 87% of brown coal EDR is accessible. Quarantined resources include the APM Mill site, which had a 50 year mining ban applied in 1980. Other quarantined resources include the coal under the town of Morwell and the Holey Plains State Park, both in Victoria. The resource life of the accessible EDR of 34 150Mt at the 2010 rate of production is just under 500 years.

There are no Joint Ore Reserve Committee (JORC) Code compliant brown coal reserves publicly reported. In the 2009 edition of AIMR, Geoscience Australia estimated, from published information, "reserves" at the operating mines to be about 4700Mt which would have a life of almost 70 years at the 2010 rate of production.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not report data relating to exploration expenditure for brown coal.

Australian brown coal production for 2009-10 was 68.75Mt, all from Victoria. The Latrobe Valley mines of Yallourn, Hazelwood and Loy Yang produce about 98% of Australia's brown coal. Locally significant brown coal operations occur at Anglesea and Maddingley.

International data for world coal resources and production uses an aggregation of coal by rank, which is different to the methodology used in Australia. In terms of resources, international estimates refer to anthracite plus bituminous coal as one group and sub-bituminous coal and lignite as a second. Australian statistics for both resources and production refer to black and brown coal where black coal includes anthracite, bituminous and sub-bituminous coal and brown coal refers to lignite. Using the international categories Australia has 9.2% of the world's proven reserves of anthracite plus bituminous coal and 8.6% of the world's proven reserves of sub-bituminous coal plus lignite. In terms of production of all coal in 2010 Australia accounted for 6.3% of world output.

In terms of the Australian coal categories it is estimated that Australia has approximately 19% of the world's recoverable brown coal EDR and ranks second behind the USA (20%). Australia produces about 7% of the world's brown coal and is ranked as the fifth largest producer after Germany (16%), Russia (8%), Turkey (7%) and China (7%).

Brown Coal Innovation Australia (BCIA) funded R&D projects in brown coal low-emissions and product innovation technologies. Included in the 2010 program were projects aimed at emerging technologies for the capture of CO2 at a lower energy and cost penalty compared with existing technologies and an international collaboration to enable gasification for brown coal-fired power generation. Other projects supported included trials to determine the merits of using brown coal to improve soil health and plant yields; research into processing methodologies to reduce spontaneous combustion of dried or dewatered brown coal; determining the best-performing, most cost-effective solvent absorbent technologies for the capture of CO2 emissions from brown coal and a literature review of next generation high-efficiency, low-cost, integrated drying. BCIA also supported investigations into gasification systems for the production of power and high-value products from brown coal and announced funding for a project involving the CSIRO Advanced Coal Technology and Exergen Pty Ltd. That project will investigate high efficiency power generation using processed Victorian brown coal in an adapted diesel engine. A HRL Developments Pty Ltd project in association with Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd received funding to study the technical and economic merits at both a pilot and commercial scale of various options for the production of hydrogen from Victoria's Latrobe Valley brown coal.

In Western Australia, Blackham Resources Ltd continued exploration on the Scaddan and Zanthus projects, near Esperance, where their aim is to establish Australia's premier coal-to-liquid facility. Blackham Resources reported that combined resource for the deposits was 1.2 billion tonnes of lignite containing 9200PJ of energy at shallow depth. The company notes that the projects have the potential to produce 600 million barrels of petroleum products consisting mainly of a clean diesel.

Mantle Mining Corporation Ltd reported that its work at the Bacchus Marsh brown coal project in Victoria had increased its confidence in the size of the coal tonnage targeted. Incorporating historic drill data into the database for the area had contributed to the increased confidence that the target of about 1.8 billion tonnes is at the upper end of their exploration target range of 1 to 2 billion tonnes.