More than 400 jobs to go at Glencore’s Hail Creek coal mine

Cecilia Jamasmie | October 15, 2018 | 3:57 am Energy Australia Coal 
Glencore coal mine in spotlight as methane hotspot emerges
Hail Creek mine is located 120 km southwest of Mackay in central Queensland and supplies international markets with hard coking and thermal coal. (Image courtesy of Rio Tinto.)

Miner and commodities trader Glencore (LON:GLEN) is cutting 430 jobs, or about 30 percent of the workforce at its Hail Creek coal mine in Queensland, Australia, following a 100-day review that began after it bought the asset from Rio Tinto.

Under the “reconfiguration” of Hail Creek, the two-dragline operation would become a truck-and-shovel mine with a seven-day-on, seven-day-off roster, meaning that employees at the mine would work seven days and take the next seven days off.

The Swiss company also said the majority of the changes will take in place by the second quarter of 2019.

Glencore is already the world’s No.1 exporter of thermal coal used for power stations, and Hail Creek — which was one of Rio Tinto’s last two remaining coal assets — gave it a bigger stake in metallurgical coal used in the making of steel.

In 2017, the mine produced about 9.4 million tonnes of coal, 5.25 million tonnes of which were coking coal and 4.13 thermal.

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Comments

  • FIFO68

    Must be pretty bloated to begin with

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