South walker creek

The South Walker Creek open cut coal mine is located in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, 35 kilometres from Nebo, where most of the mine workers are accommodated during their rostered on shifts. It is situated 132 kilometres from the port at Hay Point from where its coal product is exported to its overseas customers.

South Walker Mine Consists of Four Open Pits
The South Walker Creek has a capacity to produce 3.5 million tonnes of PCI (pulverised coal injection) quality coal and smaller amounts of thermal coal annually. The mine began production in 1995 as an open cut operation that still has its overburden removed with a single dragline and two excavators along with a fleet of rear dump trucks. The mine itself consists of four open pits.

Thiess Loses Contract to HSE Group to Take South Walker Creek Mine Forward
In February 2013 the mine owners BMC (BHP Billiton-Mitsui Coal Australia) announced it was changing mining contracting services at the mine from its long time contractor Thiess, to Perth based contractor HSE Group. HSE Group began life in the Northern Territory in 1991 as Howard Springs Earthmoving with a single front end loader. The company steadily grew and while doing so purchased extra equipment to enable it to service larger projects. As their contracts became larger so did their equipment fleet.

South Walker Creek on site personnel are accommodated in first class accommodation at a mine accommodation village situated within the nearby town of Nebo. Many of them are employed on a fly-in-fly-out basis from Mackay that is 150 kilometres to its east.

South Walker Creek Mine Owned by BHP Billiton Mitsui Coal (BMC)
BHP Mitsui Coal (BMC), the company that owns the South Walker Creek Mine, is a joint venture operation with BHP Billiton holding an 80 percent interest and Mitsubishi 20 percent. The mine is managed by BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA). Mitsubishi and BHP Billiton have both earned a reputation as leaders in the coal industry for marketing and investment in the industry, both in Australia and overseas, for more than 40 years. The combined strengths of the two companies in the one entity, such as the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA), has created a highly competitive coal mining and marketing business that produces over 25 percent of Australia's total coal exports each year, as well as a quarter of the world's total seaborne trade in metallurgical coal.

Coal is removed from the coal seams at the South Walker Creek mine with hydraulic excavators and taken to the on site processing plant, with large capacity coal haulage trucks, where it is beneficiated.

The South Walker Creek mining operation conducted by BMC began on a trial basis in 1995 to test the acceptance of its PCI and thermal coal in the export marketplace, with around 80 million tonnes of coal held in reserve. It awarded the contract to construct mining infrastructure to Thiess in 1996 that included the building of the 300 tonnes an hour coal processing plant.. The trial was to produce 100,000 tonnes as a bulk sample of its product. The project was planned to be developed in two stages:

1. The first stage involving the civil construction, infrastructure building and production of the bulk sample coal product.
2. Stage two commenced in September 1996. It consisted of developing the mine design, the excavation process, raw coal handling, the processing of the coal, the moving of the coal from the site and the loading of the trains to take the product to the port.
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