In February, we started production at our Aquila Mine in Northeast Australia. It is an operation that showcases the efforts we make to keep our people and communities safe and healthy, and to move the world towards a more sustainable future.
In February, Anglo American’s Aquila Mine, located near Middlemount in Central Queensland, Australia, achieved its first longwall shear of steelmaking coal, on schedule and on budget.
This important milestone marked the final stages of construction for a project expected to extend the life of our Capcoal complex’s existing underground operations by seven years, following our Grasstree Mine reaching its end of life in early-2022.
The safe start-up of longwall mining at Aquila, on time despite the effects of the pandemic, marked an important milestone for Anglo American’s Australian operations, and is testament of the business’ commitment to supporting both the Middlemount community and Queensland’s economy.
Themba Mkhwanazi, CEO of Bulk Commodities, said: “We have delivered the Aquila project on time and within our budgeted attributable cost of $226 million. This new mine will have a total average annual saleable production of around five million tonnes of premium quality hard coking coal and benefits from low capital intensity as we are using the existing infrastructure and systems from our adjacent operations. Aquila offers us highly attractive returns and margins at conservative long term consensus prices.”
The mine uses existing infrastructure at our Capcoal complex and supports around 600 ongoing operational roles for our Queensland-based workforce, including providing continuity of employment for our Grasstree mining team.
During Aquila’s construction phase, the project provided employment for around 1,200 people, and the majority of supply contracts were awarded to Queensland-based suppliers, including for longwall equipment, technology, and civil works.
Innovating to deliver sustainable value
At Anglo American, the safety of our people is paramount. In Aquila, we have developed one of the country’s most technologically-advanced underground mines, leveraging a combination of underground automation technology, remote operations and data analytics to drive improvements in safety and operational efficiency.
The mine features two longwalls, allowing us to operate without the downtime that is usually required for longwall moves. Both longwalls are fully remote capable and will be sequentially operated from our site-based remote operations centre on the surface of the mine. Remote operations present us with the single biggest opportunity to improve safety by removing people from harm’s way.
As with all our assets, Aquila has also been developed with a sustainability imperative. One aspect of consideration has been water usage – integral to mining and processing activities, including for equipment cooling and coal cutting operations.
A key target in our Sustainable Mining Plan is to reduce our reliance on fresh water by 50 percent by 2030 across our mine sites globally.
Aligned with this ambition, two state-of-the-art, reverse osmosis (RO) water treatment plants will be operated at Aquila. The first has been installed and, during Aquila’s construction, treated two megalitres of mine affected water per day. A planned second RO plant will further increase capacity, ensuring high quality recycled water is available for use in our mining operations, while also reducing reliance on water from other sources.
Improving the health of our host communities
Our focus on sustainability also extends into our communities – the places our people call home, our closest neighbours, and the stewards of the land entrusted to us for a period of time. Ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing within our host communities is not only essential to sustainable development; it is also integral to our ambition to leave a lasting and meaningful legacy.
In 2020, we embarked on a $1 million, three-year partnership with Heart of Australia, a mobile medical program delivering specialist services to regional and remote communities in Queensland. Our support has enabled the organisation to extend its specialist services1 from Moranbah – where our Moranbah North and Grosvenor mines are located – to the rest of the communities in which our steelmaking coal business operates, including Moura, Banana, Theodore and Middlemount; home to many of the employees that work at Aquila and across our broader Capcoal complex.
The role of steelmaking coal in the energy transition
Aquila will produce around five million tonnes of premium quality hard coking coal, a vital part of the steel value chain today. Steel is a material that will continue to form the backbone of the world’s infrastructure development for decades to come and is also fundamental to the transition to a low carbon world – given its use in much of the required equipment and infrastructure for renewable energy.
Used in the blast furnace/basic oxygen furnace (BF/BOF), the coal we provide performs three main functions2:
- Provides most of the furnace’s thermal requirements, generating temperatures of approximately 2000°C;
- Provides the majority of carbon monoxide (CO) gas, the principal agent for the reduction of iron oxides to iron in the furnace;
- Physically supports the iron ore in the furnace, providing permeability to gas flow through the furnace, and for slag and hot metal to flow down into the hearth.
The properties of the coal – including its high carbon / low ash content – helps maximise productivity, enhance the quality of hot metal, minimise the amount of coke needed and reduce the amount of CO2produced in the steelmaking process.
Around 70 per cent of worldwide steel production via the BF/BOF route currently relies on metallurgical coal3 and the assets within Anglo American’s portfolio produce a high-quality product ideal for serving more modern, highly-efficient, lower carbon intensity steel mills.
As the world transitions, we will continue to act as responsible stewards of such natural resources, balancing the best interests of all our stakeholders.
1 The services provided by the charity include cardiology, gynecology, neurology, gastroenterology, urology, sleep studies, respiratory services, and endocrinology
2 Best in Class: Australia’s Bulk Commodity Giants, Minerals Council of Australia, Anthony Le Bas, https://bit.ly/3wFVCNm
3 World Steel Association, World Steel in Figures, 2020 (from Best in Class: Australia’s Bulk Commodity Giants by Minerals, P.4), https://bit.ly/3wFVCNm
