Conference dealing not only with coal mining evolution in the Czech Republic

PRAHA – Coal is a significant energy and industrial raw material of the Czech Republic. This statement was agreed upon by the participants in the discussion conference titled Coal Mining in the Czech Republic: Future Alternative Evolution Options. On June 1, 2010, it was organized by the Institute for Public Discussion in Prague. Apart from the others, Ján Fabián, Chief Development and Strategy Officer and Deputy Chief Executive Officer of OKD, also had a presentation at the conference.

He presented our mining company, while emphasizing that OKD is the only one hard coal mining company in Europe that has been profitable for a long time. He stated that the reserves of its four mines (Karviná, Darkov, ČSM and Paskov), including coal reserves in  Debiensko, amount to 407 million tons. The customers mostly include energy and steel-making companies. “For this year, the Mining Plan amounts to 11.5 mil. tons of hard coal. As per the internationally recognized JORC classification, which assesses the mineral reserves, we have available 217 million tons of coal reserves in OKD itself, which almost represents a 20-year life time for our company,” stated Fabián.

“However in fact, the geological reserves of hard coal in our coal district reach a level of above 2 billion tons. In spite of the state-of-the-art character of our technologies,  they allow us to extract just a portion of such reserves, and due to other circumstances, the JORC calculations further reduce this figure to the said amount of 217 million tons. The JORC estimates have not either included the Frenštát Mine, which contains over 1.5 billion tons of geological reserves of coal,” remarked Fabián.

Furthermore, he pointed out that OKD ranks among the largest employers in Northern Moravia, as well as in the Czech Republic – it employs over 17,000 people. Its strategic pillars are safety and productivity. EUR 20 mil. have been invested in the safety improvement; the POP 2010 Productivity Optimization Programme has been completed by installing 10 new mining  complexes and 20 driving complexes (at a cost of more the EUR 350 mil.); the  upgrading of coking plants is in progress (EUR EUR 60 mil.); the Development Plan for the Debiensko Mine, Poland  has been finalized (EUR 400 mil.).

All the safety and upgrading investments contribute to a significant reduction of the accident incident rate and labour productivity growth. Thanks to that, the OKD coal mining was also profitable last year, which was significantly affected by the global economic crisis.

The Prague conference also discussed the brown coal mining industry, natural gas utilization, as well as nuclear power industry. The eight-item draft of the conclusions of the conference held in Prague in June among others states that there are high-quality hard coal reserves in the Czech Republic, and the attitude and binding standpoint of the state towards the utilization of the country’s own  mineral reserves and the issues of safety and reliability of raw material supplies to the Czech market will be important.

(Josef Lys)