Centennial Coal has decided to put its Angus Place mine at Western Coalfields in New South Wales under care and maintenance due to falling prices of international coal.
Angus Place mine is operated by an equally owned joint venture between Centennial Coal and Springvale SK Kores called Springvale / Angus Place Joint Venture.
The mine will be placed under care and maintenance from November, as part of the company’s restructuring plan for its Western Region operation.
Angus Place currently employs 268 people, of which 100 are planned to be relocated to the nearby Springvale mine.
Centennial Coal said in a statement: “As operator, Centennial has proposed a proportion of the Angus Place workforce would be relocated to Springvale, where the plan would be to ramp-up Springvale, increasing production, improving productivity and reducing costs, while also seeking to minimise the number of redundancies.
“In order to achieve this, the Angus Place longwall and two development crews and equipment would need to be redeployed to Springvale.
“The transfer…will result in increased production, and accordingly, no loss of production during the traditional five-week longwall changeover periods usually experienced every seven to eight months at Springvale.”
Centennial managing director David Moult was quoted by Abc.net as saying: “We’ve got about 150 potential redundancies at Angus Place but of course we haven’t finished that process, we’re still working with other operations to see what we can do to accommodate as many people as we can.”
Earlier in August, Centennial Coal stopped production at Newstan underground colliery in the Western Lake Macquarie, which resulted in the loss of 100 jobs.