Industrial Development of the Coal Resources of Kuzbass over Forty Years of Soviet Power

D. A. Strelnikov

In the years preceding the Great October Socialist Revolution, the coal resources of Kuzbass remained virtually untouched. One may say that neither prospecting nor exploration for coal was being carried out to any sufficient extent.

At that time there were also no serious consumers of mineral fuel. Only the construction of the Siberian railway trunk line in the last years of the nineteenth century compelled a search for it. Private initiative also awakened. As a result, by the beginning of the twentieth century, near the railway stations of Anzherskaya and Sudzhenka, coal seams of workable thickness and high calorific value had already been found. The coal-bearing areas adjoining from the north directly to the line of the Siberian trunk railway were transferred to the administration and operation of the Siberian, later the Tomsk, Railway; these were the “state-owned” mines. And to the north of these areas the owner of the coal plots became the private entrepreneur Mikhelson; these were the “Mikhelson” mines.

These two enterprises became the pioneers in the industrial development of the coal resources of Kuzbass. Thanks to the existence of a reliable consumer of the coal produced, in the form of the railway, both of these enterprises, although very slowly, began gradually to increase coal output, and in 1913 the Anzhero-Sudzhenka district brought its production up to 763 thousand tons per year.

By this time, i.e., in 1912–1913, the Joint-Stock Company of the Kuznetsk Coal Mines (“Kopikuz”) had also been organized; on a contractual basis it received from the treasury the right to develop mineral resources (including the coal of Kuzbass and the iron ores of Mountain Shoria). Possessing sufficient funds, Kopikuz from its first years began to set up the working of individual coal seams in Kemerovo, Kolchugino, and other places in Kuzbass, where the future mines of the Kemerovo and Kolchugino (now Leninsk-Kuznetsky) coalfields of Kuzbass gradually began to be created. In parallel with Kopikuz, prospecting and exploration work for hard coal was organized under the direction of the great expert of that time in this field, L. I. Lutugin.

As a result, coal output in Kuzbass in 1917—the year of the Great October Socialist Revolution—reached 1,256.4 thousand tons. Three quarters (more precisely, 76.4%) of this quantity of coal was supplied by the oldest district in Kuzbass, the Anzhero-Sudzhenka district; 168.7 thousand tons were mined in the Leninsk district, and 114.7 thousand tons in the Kemerovo district. In that year it began to issu-

coal began to be mined in the Prokopyevsk district of Kuzbass, chiefly in connection with the exploratory work being carried out there.

With the establishment of Soviet power in Siberia, the coal mines and all private enterprises connected with them (Mikhelson, Kopikuz, and others) were nationalized and began to develop in a planned manner, more rapidly than before. Prospecting and exploration work was intensified, which helped to determine the sequence in which the coal resources of all districts of Kuzbass should be developed.

Thanks to the exceptional attention and material support of the Soviet government, and to the planned organization of all work, coal production in Kuzbass in 1928–1929, i.e., by the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, reached 2,877.9 thousand tons. Thus, by this time coal production in Kuzbass exceeded the 1913 output by more than three times. Over the entire First Five-Year Plan, average annual coal production increased 4.3-fold, and in the Second Five-Year Plan it became more than 13 times greater.

The change in coal production in Kuzbass over the entire period, from 1913 through 1956, can be seen from Table 1 below.

Table 1

If in 1913 the Anzhero-Sudzhensk district was almost the sole supplier of coal for industry, chiefly for transport, and in terms of its share among the other districts accounted for 98.7%, then in 1937—by the end of the Second Five-Year Plan—the young Prokopyevsk district took first place in coal production, yielding in that operating year 37.1% of the total coal output in Kuzbass; second place was occupied by the Leninsk-Kuznetsky district, which supplied 17.1% of the coal of Kuzbass’s total output; the Anzhero-Sudzhensk district was already in third place, supplying only 16.8%. The remaining districts of Kuzbass had still smaller shares: Kiselevsk—11.3%, Osinniki—7.5%, Aralichevsky—5.7%, and the smallest amount of all was supplied by Kemerovo, which produced only 4.1%.

During the years of the First and Second Five-Year Plans, the development of coal mining in Kuzbass was achieved as a result of putting new mines into operation, through new construction on an ever-increasing scale, and also through the fundamental reconstruction of the basin’s old mines.

By 1938, by the beginning of the Third Five-Year Plan, 54 new mines and adits had been laid down in Kuzbass. Their total design capacity in 1938 had been brought up to 3,489.5 thousand tons; of these, 34 were small mines with a capacity of up to 300 thousand tons of annual output. The construction of small mines was dictated chiefly by the rapid deployment of coal production at them; moreover, they did not require tunneling equipment and materials that were in short supply at the time, but, on the other hand, they often supplied coal from seams at outcrops and therefore of insufficiently high quality—more often steam coal, and not the kinds from which coke could be obtained, of which the metallurgical industry of the USSR was especially in need.

The role of the new, more productive mines grew very rapidly; whereas in 1930 they accounted for only 5.3% of total coal output in Kuzbass, by 1932 they already accounted for 42.2%, while the old, unreconstructed mines, instead of 60.1% in 1930, produced in 1932 only 32.4% of total coal output.

By the beginning of the third five-year plan, i.e., by 1938, the Kuznetsk Basin had a mine stock of 36 production units (mines) with a total designed capacity of 27,935 thousand tons, as against 11 units possessed by Kuzbass at the beginning of the first five-year plan, with a total production capacity of 3,780 thousand tons. If the average annual load per mine in the first five-year plan was 261 thousand tons, then in the third five-year plan it rose to 616 thousand tons; consequently, the number of production units (mines) increased threefold over the first three five-year plans, and their designed capacity became 5.7 times greater than before.

In this same period a number of large mines were built in Kuzbass: mine 5/7 in the Anzhero-Sudzhensk district, with a designed capacity of 1.7 million tons per year; the S. M. Kirov Mine in the Leninsk-Kuznetsk district—1.5 million tons; the “Coking” Mine named after I. V. Stalin—3.2 million tons, and others.

In the years before the first five-year plan, pillar systems predominated at the mines of Kuzbass.

In the Anzhero-Sudzhensk district, the most widespread system of working was long pillars on the rise, with extraction by entry cuts; in terms of the number of preparatory workings, these were closer to variants of short pillars, but already in the 1920s a transition began toward the use of more productive long pillars along the strike. In the same district one could then see the use of inclined and horizontal slices in mining the thick seams there: in the Tenth and Andreev seams, with caving and with manual stowing of the worked-out space with waste rock.

At the mines of the Kemerovo district, even before 1917, alongside long pillars, horizontal slices with stowing and caving were in use; later came “zones” and the chamber system, introduced into the mines during the period of operation of the American Industrial Colony (AIC).

In the first and second five-year plans, much attention was attracted by the working of thick seams, chiefly steeply dipping ones, in which the Prokopyevsk and Kiselevsk districts in Kuzbass were especially rich, by means of zones. The zones, despite a considerable number of variants (with stowing and with caving), were in fact variants of typical horizontal slices.

Alongside the zones, at the end of the second five-year plan the chamber system became fairly widespread on thick seams; both these systems of working, especially by chambers, were accompanied by significant coal losses, as a result of which underground fires arose. In connection with this, a resolution was issued by the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR on eliminating predatory variants of systems for working thick seams with caving and on the necessity of shifting to mining with stowing of the worked-out space and replacing them with inclined and horizontal slices. In addition, during this same period, for the purpose of preventing and extinguishing underground fires, especially in the Prokopyevsk and Kiselevsk districts, stowing operations began to be used; these led to a reduction in the number of fires that had arisen in previous years and, to a certain extent, prevented the occurrence of new ones,

although to the present day the technology of their production remains imperfect.

From 1941—the beginning of the Great Patriotic War—and until 1950, before the beginning of the Fifth Five-Year Plan, in connection with the significant growth in demand for the coals of the Kuznetsk Basin, especially during the period of the temporary occupation of the Donbas by the German fascists, it became necessary temporarily to abandon the use of mining systems with stowing of the worked-out space and to return again to the use of mining systems with caving and with extraction of thick coal seams to their full thickness by chambers with magazine storage, chambers with retreat extraction of coal, and so forth.

Substantial assistance in resolving the question of greater coal output was provided in this period by the shield system proposed by mining engineer, later Professor Doctor N. A. Chinakal; year by year it gradually came to be applied more and more widely thanks to its inherent advantages.

In this same period, questions concerning mining systems in Kuzbass, especially for thick seams, were repeatedly discussed with the participation of individual major mining specialists and by a number of commissions, which included academicians, members of the Scientific and Technical Council of the coal industry, and representatives of the Council of Labor and Defense in 1933; special conferences were held: the first All-Kuzbass conference in 1937, the second All-Kuzbass conference on mining systems in 1940, and a meeting held in Kemerovo with the participation of prominent scientists and specialists in 1948. All of them came to one conclusion—the need to improve methods for mining thick coal seams in Kuzbass, and especially systems with stowing of the worked-out space.

In the following years a number of positive results were achieved at the mines of Kuzbass in methods of mining the thick seams of Kuzbass, although stowing operations were carried out mainly in the form of gravity stowing, the most primitive type based on manual labor, and therefore did not ensure the achievement of sufficiently high technical and economic indicators under the systems then being used for mining thick coal seams.

With the end of the Great Patriotic War the situation changed radically. On the one hand, when systems with caving were used, losses of coal were reduced more often as a result of rationalization of these systems; on the other hand, measures were adopted to master not only gravity stowing but, chiefly, mechanized stowing: pneumatic, mechanical, and hydraulic.

The production workers of Kuzbass, together with scientific institutions, solved a number of problems concerning the technology of stowing operations; stowing machines and equipment for them were designed. Alongside these achievements, obtained at the Stalinugol Trust in Prokopyevsk, especially at the Koksovaya mine, in recent years there have remained, and still remain, unresolved to the proper extent such major and important questions as could ensure the broad application and cheapening of stowing operations in the mines of Kuzbass, namely: the creation of central quarries for the extraction of stowing materials; the development of more advanced designs of high-capacity and economical stowing machines suited to the conditions and mining systems of Kuzbass. Stowing machines are proving necessary here today, and all the more will they be needed tomorrow, when the mines of Kuzbass move to deeper horizons, where the gas content of the seams will be increased, where losses of the useful mineral must be reduced even more than at present, and where greater safety in the conduct of mining operations must be ensured.

From Table 2 below it can be seen that, in the period from 1940 to 1956, among the mining systems most frequently used in the Kuzbass trusts were long pillars in a number of variants and the continuous system; in working thick, gently dipping and inclined seams—slice systems, predominantly inclined slices, and less often long pillars; and in steeply dipping thick seams not only inclined but also horizontal slices. Especially widely used over the last 10–15 years has been the shield system, with a large number of variants of this system already mastered or under trial—more often with caving, less often with stowing.

Table 2

Distribution of coal output by mining systems, as a percentage of total underground output in Kuzbass as a whole in 1940–1956

The data of Table 2 indicate that:

1) the shield system, in the period from 1940 to 1956, steadily increases its share among other mining systems, rising from 3.5% in 1940 to 25.1% in the 1957 plan;

2) the continuous mining system, on the contrary, is gradually and quite sharply declining in its share: from 26% in 1940 to 4.8% in the plan for coal output in 1957;

3) long pillars relatively steadily retain first place—they have been most frequently used in the mines of Kuzbass for more than the last decade and a half. But there is reason to think that in the coming years a number of proposals by innovators and designers, put forward at the recent competition and briefly described in No. 4 of the journal Ugol’ for 1957, will partially narrow the field of application in Kuzbass of the long-pillar system—this one of the leading systems in the mines of Kuzbass;

4) the share of inclined slices in total coal output at the mines of Kuzbass is increasing, but comparatively slowly;

5) horizontal slices, as a low-productivity system, are being displaced by other, more productive mining systems, in particular by transverse-inclined slices with stowing and others.

A more concrete solution to the question of mining systems at the Kuzbass mines in the subsequent years of the Sixth Five-Year Plan may be aided by comparing the data of the two tables given below: the third, which gives data on the distribution of industrial coal reserves in seams at the Kuzbass mines as of January 1, 1956, and the fourth, which gives specific data on the share of coal output at the Kuzbass mines in 1956 from seams of the same groups by thickness and dip as those given in Table 3.

From the data given in this table it is clear that the bulk of the industrial reserves of Kuzbass are concentrated in seams of thin and lower-medium thickness (44.65% of the industrial coal reserves at all

Table 3

Share of industrial coal reserves in Kuzbass mines by thickness and dip of the seams being worked

mines of the basin) and in thick seams with a thickness of more than 3.50 m (43.25%). Of the thin seams, 20.63% belong to gently dipping seams, while of the thick seams 32.27% of all reserves are contained in steeply dipping seams—over 45°. Thick seams with an inclined dip from 25 to 44° are not typical for the conditions of Kuzbass, since they contain only 5.53% of all industrial reserves.

It is of no small interest to establish how these industrial reserves were used in 1956, i.e., in the first year of the Sixth Five-Year Plan. Data on this are given below, in Table 4.

Table 4

Share of coal output in Kuzbass mines from seams of the same groups by thickness and dip as in Table 3

A comparison of the data in the third and fourth tables indicates that all categories of industrial coal reserves, both by seam thickness and by dip angle, are being extracted in a ratio close to their shares by both factors—thickness and dip.

Industrial coal reserves are concentrated mainly, on the one hand, in thin and below-average-thickness seams (0.71–2.50 m), amounting to 44.65%, with gently dipping seams predominating in these reserves; on the other hand, in thick seams (over 3.5 m), reserves amounted to 43.25%, with their predominance in steeply dipping seams.

Hence, the most important question in solving the technical progress and technology of field development must be considered, for subsequent-

...of the near future are the problems of working thin gently dipping seams and thick steeply dipping seams.

Here it must also be noted that both groups of seams already have practical solutions emerging for the question of their extraction: with the use of combines on thin gently dipping seams and shield mining on thick steeply dipping seams.

The data of the same tables indicate that the question of mining thin seams of steep dip is being resolved in an entirely unsatisfactory manner. If reserves of seams with a thickness of 0.71–2.50 m and with a dip of more than 45° amount to 16.88%, then coal output from these same seams is only 9.0%. The question of mining thick seams with a dip angle of 45–60° has likewise been resolved unsatisfactorily. With industrial reserves amounting to 11.55%, output from them is only 7.30%.

Industrial reserves concentrated in seams of medium thickness, within the range from 2.51 to 3.50 m, are being mined successfully; with reserves of 12%, 15.4% was extracted in 1956. But a substantial shortcoming must be seen in the fact that, in this group of seams, only a small part has a more or less satisfactory solution to the problem of mechanizing coal extraction. The same may be said of the mining of gently dipping seams 2.5 to 3 meters thick, which are extracted by combines with movable bars designed by workers and technicians of the Kuzbass mines. The question of mechanizing the extraction of the remaining seams of this group has not been resolved at all.

At present it may be considered that there is absolutely no solution for the mechanization of extraction of thick coal seams with a dip from 0 to 44°, although the reserves of this group of seams amount to more than 10% of all industrial reserves of the basin.

Thus, it may be said that about half of the industrial reserves of the Kuznetsk Basin are extracted by more productive methods and systems of mining, while the remaining part of the reserves is extracted by low-productivity systems with a predominance of manual labor. This is why, in order radically to change the technology and procedure of mining coal seams in the Kuzbass mines in subsequent years, as well as sharply to increase labor productivity and reduce the cost of coal, it is necessary first of all to solve the problems of applying more advanced, more productive mining systems.

Special attention should be paid: a) to the mechanization and automation of labor-intensive and auxiliary operations both in underground stopes and on the surface; and b) to the organization of labor and work both in extraction stopes and in the faces of development workings.

In addition, one cannot disregard the fact that, with the further deepening of mining operations at Kuzbass mines, the questions not only of mining systems as such, but also of ventilation of all faces under the mining systems being used will require increased attention, since it is assumed that gas emission in the faces will increase with depth, and since at a number of mines cases of sudden outbursts of gas and coal dust have become more frequent.

Nor can one disregard the fact that, with the broad development planned for the future in the underground application at Kuzbass mines of a new method of mining coal seams—hydraulic coal extraction—a considerable number of questions will have to be resolved, beginning with mining systems for these methods of extraction, the order of mining, reduction of coal losses to the possible minimum, ensuring safety, etc., since in the past all these questions did not receive an entirely satisfactory solution.

In earlier times, in particular in the 1930s, experiments in underground gasification were carried out quite successfully in the Leninsk district of Kuzbass—on gently dipping seams; in recent years they have been resumed in the Kiselevsk district—on steeply dipping seams. This area of developing the coal resources of Kuzbass also requires further study and development, especially with regard to the use of underground gasification on very thin seams and on seams with coals of high ash content, the mining of which by ordinary methods and systems is often quite simply abandoned.

Finally, in Kuzbass there are conditions that make it possible successfully, and in a considerable number of districts and sections, to employ open-cast mining; by developing it one can secure additional coal production, according to preliminary estimates, of up to two or three tens of millions of tons per year, and thereby not only increase coal output from the basin as a whole, but also reduce the cost of coal. The conditions for mining coal seams in Kuzbass at their outcrops by open-cast methods appear exceptionally varied in terms of the number of seams worked, their thickness and dip, etc. Meanwhile, the schemes of stripping, the systems of mining, the transport of the coal produced, etc., still require great attention today, since they are still far from having been brought to a satisfactory solution.

It should be assumed, in the final analysis, that through the initiative of local engineering and technical workers and innovators, with the active assistance of all the scientific-research institutions serving Kuzbass—such as KuzNIIUI, VostNII, the Kuznetsk branch of Giprouglemash, the West Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, as well as the three mining higher educational institutions and faculties: the oldest mining faculty of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute, the mining faculty of the Stalin Metallurgical Institute, and the Kemerovo Mining Institute—all the questions posed above in the field of the industrial development of the coal resources of Kuzbass will be solved in the most correct manner and in a shorter time.

REFERENCES

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