Tahmoor Colliery


Tahmoor Colliery is an underground coal mine at Tahmoor in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales, Australia. It operates in the Bulli coal seam. Most of the mine product is hard coking coal used for steel making. A small quantity of steaming blend coal used for power generation is also produced. Both products are exported to Europe and Asia.
Tahmoor Colliery was bought by the SIMEC Group in early 2018. It had been owned by Glencore which acquired it as part of Xstrata. Following the sale, the mine will also provide feed for GFG's Whyalla steelworks. It was formally opened by Sanjeev Gupta on 5 May 2018.
The mine was reported in 2017 as having of reserves and total resource.
In 2013, extension of the mine was anticipated to take below a railway tunnel on the Main Southern railway line. To avoid the risk of subsidence within the tunnel, the mine's owner at the time, Xstrata Coal, constructed a diversion around Redbank Hill to remove trains from the tunnel, which was filled with rock and sealed.

Incidents

Tahmoor Colliery has a history of outbursts where gas trapped in the coal violently escapes during mining, throwing hundreds of tonnes of coal and rock, and large amounts of suffocating gas. One miner was killed as a consequence of one of these outbursts in 1985. At the time, the colliery was owned by Kembla Coal and Coke Pty Limited, a subsidiary of CRA (now Rio Tinto Group. In 1994, it was reported that Tahmoor had recorded 89 outbursts up to April 1992. In response to that fatality, practices and equipment were upgraded, initially to provide a separately-ventilated and armoured operator cabin, and later to provide remote control.
In September 2018, two men were trapped underground when the lift cage jammed in the mine shaft. They were uninjured, and rescued late in the evening by Fire and Rescue NSW.