UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 14, 2019. EVRAZ Holding recently purchased the self-propelled drilling unit Epiroc T3W for its member enterprise Raspadskaya Coal Company. The gets used to drill gas exhaust wells from the surface.

According to the company’s press service, the unit is currently being used at Uskovskaya Mine and will later get transferred to Yerunakovskaya 8 Mine.

By customer’s order, the equipment manufacturer improved the design of the unit by mounting it on an all-wheel drive tractor to ensure easier transportation and by adding a welding machine to make repair and maintenance easier.

The drilling jobs get done by workers from Raspadskaya Coal Company’s Southern Kuzbass geological survey division. They use the new drilling equipment to make vertical wells (varying in depth) from the surface. The wells get opened in the mining process, with exhaust gas removed with the help of a gas-draining unit.

‘This technology makes it possible to efficiently remove large amounts of methane; it has been in use since 2015. Thanks to this technology, more than 175,000,000 m3 of exhaust gas got removed from our mines in the last three years. We also apply other gas-draining methods: the preliminary draining out of gases, the barrier kind, and the plasma impulse excitation kind,’ the company says.

EVRAZ adds new units to its set of mining equipment on a yearly basis. The new appliances and new technologies, in combination with regular airing, dust suppression, and air-gas control, ensure the stoping and mining work stays safe.

Both Yerunakovskaya 8 Mine and Uskovskaya Mine get managed by Raspadskaya Coal Company; Raspadskaya also acts as a management company for EVRAZ Holding’s other coal-mining assets within PAO Raspadskaya and OAO OUK Yuzhkuzbassugol.