Hundred of employees at the Stockton mine face a change of employer with owner Solid Energy naming Australian company Downer EDI Mining as a preferred new partner.
Stockton's main contractors, Doug Hood Mining and Kaipara Excavators, are leaving after six years at the mine. Hood employs 492 of the 700 workers at the mine in the Buller region of the West Coast, the Westport News reported. Kaipara employs about 60. Hood did not bid for the alliance.
State-owned Solid Energy intends to negotiate an alliance with Downer EDI to jointly manage and operate the opencast mine, which is its biggest asset, from October.
Once allied, Solid Energy could employ Downer EDI's technology and techniques in getting to increasingly difficult-to-reach patches of coal, mine manager Ian Harvey said.
"At the moment there are a lot of operations staff who come from our primary contractor. When the Doug Hood contract finishes, we'll lose a lot of those staff. Some will be directly replaced by our alliance partner," he said.
There had been an ongoing staff shortage, especially in the area of mine planning, due to the Australian mining boom. The new partner could help address this.
"Primarily ... as far as staff are concerned, as opposed to collective employees, I don't see there will necessarily be that many who don't have a job. It's really to add capability to what we don't have at the moment." In recent years, miners have been digging about 2 million tonnes of high-grade coal from the mine.
Solid Energy requested proposals for alliance partners in December 2008.
Though the Solid Energy had named the Australian company as their preferred partner, the details of the deal still had to be worked out. The two miners would operate the mine as a single entity, with the deal lasting for five years. Alliances in the mining industry commonly involved profit and loss-sharing arrangements.
Solid Energy sent most of the coal mined at Stockton to India, China, Japan, South Africa and Brazil, where it was used in steel mills.
