ORIGINAL
FY 76

($ millions)

TOTAL

95.089

TOTAL

OPENING REMARKS OF DIRECTOR

Mr. FALKIE. I Would like to introduce Dr. Joseph Yancik, Assistant Director, Mining.

I would like to apologize for being late to the hearing. What we have done, Mr. Chairman, is made some minor changes in the statement, but I understand the statement submitted to you is the corrected version.

Second, we have given you some charts that I am not going to go through except for the first few charts. These charts were intended to demonstrate precisely what is the tone of the discussion here for the last few minutes, and that is that the country needs to be more reliant on coal as a means for solving some of the problems that were discussed previously today.

I would like to skip over, if you will, to chart No. 8, and discuss very briefly and summarize for you what we are trying to do with this $15 million budget amendment.

.. This is the fiscal year 1976 budget of the Bureau of Mines as originally submitted by the President last year. There have been some actions taken by the House. The $15 million would be added to the mining research program.

COAL EXTRACTION RESEARCH

The Bureau of Mines conducts the coal extraction research for the Federal Government and the part of the extraction research that we are talking about today has to do with advancing coal mining technology. But we would like to point out once again that the Bureau of Mines is doing work related to environment in mining and related to health and safety in mining, in research and development, and we consider an integrated approach as the way to approach the problem of developing mining technology.

That is the point we are trying to bring out by this chart.
Mr. MURTHA. Integrated with whom?

Mr. FALKIE. In terms of actually building it into the mining system. You cannot consider productivity or production without considering health and safety and environment at the same time. That is what we mean by that.

Now the mining program is divided into three major program areas as shown in chart No. 10. We have listed them here as a way of putting together the major program areas, health research, safety research, and remind you also this is metal and nonmetal and some oil shale mining research that the Bureau of Mines is doing under this program.

Chart No. 11 shows the budget submissions as again originally submitted to the Congress last year in the mining program. The part of the mining program that we are specifically talking about here today is the coal mining program under advancing mining technology. In that part of the program, what we are trying to do is improve existing systems or techniques and new improved techniques for increasing productivity and production in our coal mines. That will go up from $45 million to $60 million if this amendment is approved.

IMPROVEMENT OF COAL MINING SYSTEMS

I would like to point out in this next chart, number 12, that a good bit of our effort is going into improving existing systems. We may have used this chart before, but the three basic systems that are used in underground coal mining are conventional, continuous, and long wall. About 3 percent of the underground mining is done by long wall, approximately 37 percent by conventional, and about 60 percent by continuous mining.

If you calculate what is theoretically possible with each of those systems, you get what we show in the orange bar here. If we put what we have in "best to date" in this country, in production from the systems on a tons-per-shift basis, we plotted this in green. Clearly it is much less than the theoretical capacity.

Now if we put the average capacity that we are getting in this country in red, you can see the difference between the average capacity and the theoretical capacity is so great as to tell you that clearly there is room for improvement in increasing production from existing systems. So what we are trying to do with our coal mining technology program, one objective is to improve the production of existing systems by evolving these systems into more efficient ones.

FUTURE COAL MINING SYSTEMS

We are also working on advanced systems, looking at the future; how are we going to mine the thin seams, how are we going to mine the thick, deep seams, and the very deep seams of coal?

So we are looking 20, 30 years out into the future as well. The next chart, number 13, is a breakdown of the subprogram areas under the mining technology program, that part of the program for which we are asking a $15 million increase. To show you the type of thing we are trying to do, first of all, we are trying to further automate existing systems, automated long wall, remote controlled continuous mining, automated continuous roof support, and so forth.

This is part of the ongoing program now started last year when the coal mining budget was first instituted by the Government.

SURFACE MINING RESEARCH

In addition, I would like to point out very quickly that we are also doing a significant amount of surface mining research. How do you mine the aquifers and reclaim the aquifers in the West? We are talking about the mining part of it, the Bureau of Mines is the mining part. How do you build land reclamation into the mining system? Mr. EVANS. Very, very carefully, I hope.

Mr. FALKIE. Yes.

Mr. CARLSON. In Colorado.

Mr. FALKIE. Thank you.

COAL MINING RESEARCH PROGRAM

In the part we are asking to increase, it would be to increase all of these programs connected with underground mining and surface mining. What we are trying to do, to summarize, is to improve the existing