Leigh Creek Coal Mine - Getting Ready for the Carbon Trading Price

Leigh Creek was a 'company town'
maintained with terrific infrastructure 

The third day of the tour was a day to recuperate. We slept the night at Leigh Creek. This is the site of South Australia’s only coal mine. Its sends one train-load per day to Port Augusta (some 500 km away) in 162 trolley-cars that make up Australia’s longest trains (2.8 km long). We learned all these statistics through meeting a guy who was training to drive the train. He has decades of experience driving coal trains in the Hunter Valley… and has taken up relieving duties at Leigh Creek for a bit of a change. The township of Leigh Creek is a Company Town… all buildings are owned and maintained by the coal company. The old site for the town was changed in 1980 to allow coal to be dug under the old town. The new town was designed and built while the coal mine was owned by the State Government. As a result, the standard of infrastructure in the town is first class. The town has a massive water supply. We went out to the dam this afternoon in search for more yellow-footed rock wallabies (without success). The town parks and street trees are fed from serviced sewerage waste. The 28,000 native trees planted in the town make it an oasis in the desert. The mine has an expected life of 7 more years. The population of 600 will then move on and one thought is that the town will then probably pass to aboriginal ownership.

Loading Coal onto Train 

As part of our ’quiet day’, we took the Coal Mine tour. The mine was recently (5 years ago) sold for $330 million… a bargain when compared to the infrastructure invested in the town and the mine… but probably reasonable when discounting future net earnings. The coal produced is classed as ’brown coal’ because of its high sulphur content and other impurities. The power station at Port Augusta had to be specially designed to burn the type of brown coal mined at Leigh Creek. At the end of the tour, we were given a sample of coal and it looked pretty black to me. Another participant in the Mine tour was a retired fellow from the Pilbarra in Western Australia. He had driven and taught other drivers to handle the giant trucks used to shift the overburden and coal. He also was a font of wisdom on his subject matter. The tour guide indicated that there was coal with deeper overburden… but with a price on carbon likely through a CTS arrangement of one kind or another, most staff were making plans to end their work at Leigh Creek at the end of 7 years. It is a pity that this town built to defy a desert in such style has such a limited future.  If you can think of a prosperous future for the good folk of Leigh Creek, drop your suggestions into the local Progress Association.

By-the-way, we did stand by the track to count the 162 trolley-cars of the coal train as it went by. Got up to 35... Looked at the length of the line still to come and decided to accept the facts of the experts… it’s a long train! We were at Copley, (very close to the mine), famous for its Quandong Café, which serves quandong pie. Unfortunately for us all these native peach tarts had already been consumed by the bus load of tourists who arrived just before we did! Luckily we had already sampled this pie the previous day at Blimnan!