PROCEEDINGS
OF THE TOMSK ORDER OF THE RED BANNER OF LABOR POLYTECHNIC
INSTITUTE named after S. M. KIROV

Vol. 178　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　1969

PROSPECTS FOR THE INTEGRATED USE IN THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF THE SOUTHEASTERN SECTION OF THE “VASYUGANSKOYE” PEAT DEPOSIT IN TOMSK AND NOVOSIBIRSK OBLASTS

G. M. PETROV

Novosibirsk and Tomsk oblasts, on whose territory the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit is located, possess reserves of a variety of natural resources.

Thus, on the territory of Tomsk Oblast large reserves of oil, gas, and brown coal have been discovered.

In the area of the village of Bakchar and the town of Kolpashevo, colossal reserves of iron ores with shallow occurrence have been identified.

On the territory of Novosibirsk Oblast there are significant reserves of hard coal, gas, and deposits of various mineral resources.

In addition, enormous timber reserves are concentrated on the territory of Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts.

However, the industrial development of the natural resources of the oblasts presents great difficulties, and one of the main difficulties in developing this region is its swampiness.

Peat reserves in Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts amount to more than 28 billion tons and occupy an area of about 10 million hectares.

Peat deposits almost everywhere serve as a cover over the mineral resources identified on the territory of Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts.

The development of natural wealth will require, first of all, the drainage of vast swampy territories.

Indeed, the present state of the peat-covered expanses, their waterlogging and impassability, create significant obstacles to the realization of all problems involved in developing the oil-and-gas, iron-ore, forest, and other riches of Western Siberia.

However, the peat-covered territories themselves represent an enormous potential of fuel-and-energy and biochemical resources, highly fertile lands, valuable organic fertilizers, and raw materials for heat-insulating, construction, and bedding materials. The drainage of these territories and their development within the overall complex of developing the productive forces of Western Siberia will make it possible not only to overcome the main obstacle to the development of this richest region of the country, but also to increase the overall economic efficiency of capital investments.

The drainage of peat deposits and swampy lands will lead to an improvement in the country’s climate and will be one of the most important

measures to combat gnats—a scourge of the population and animals in waterlogged regions.

Thus, all of the above gives grounds to consider that the question of draining and comprehensively using the peatlands of Western Siberia is already becoming an important national-economic problem, the successful solution of which will contribute to the rapid and powerful development of the country’s productive forces.

Therefore, the principal task is to substantiate the technical feasibility and economic expediency of draining and comprehensively developing the eastern and southern sections of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit, with an area of about 1.0 million ha, as a priority component of the overall general prospect for developing the natural resources of the West Siberian Lowland.

The southeastern sections of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit have been studied most fully; they are located closer to industrial regions and lie in two oblasts: Tomsk Oblast—on the territory of Krivosheinsky, Shegarsky, and Bakcharsky districts—and Novosibirsk Oblast—on the territory of Kolyvansky, Chulymsky, Kargatsky, Ubinsky, and Severny districts.

The total area of the sections under consideration within zero boundaries is 1,090 thousand ha, and under peat deposits within industrial boundaries at depths of 0.5 and 0.7 m—878 thousand ha. The reserve of raw peat is 19 billion m³. The balance reserve is 18,755 million m³ over an area of 877 thousand ha. The reserve of air-dry peat is calculated at 2,523 million t at 40% moisture content.

By category of exploration and study, the peat reserves of the sections under consideration may provisionally be assigned to category C₁ (preliminary exploration). In the sections under consideration four types of deposit have been identified: raised-bog, lowland, transitional, and mixed.

The largest percentage is accounted for by deposits of lowland peat (48%).

The raised-bog type of deposit amounts to 32.9%, and 11% falls to the mixed and transitional types, respectively.

The principal average qualitative indicators for the sections under consideration are given in Table 1.

Table 1

In the sections under consideration there are large reserves of slightly decomposed peat, suitable for bedding and for the manufacture of peat-insulating boards.

The reserve of slightly decomposed peat is calculated at 427 million t at 40% moisture content over an area of 280 thousand ha; of this, the reserve of peat-insulating raw material is calculated at 110 million t over an area of about 89 thousand ha.

Peat reserves of 2,095 million t over 876 thousand ha are fuel reserves; of these, over an area of 280 thousand ha only the lower layers are suitable, since in the upper layers the peat has a low degree of decomposition.

The main water receivers for the sections under consideration are the rivers: Shegarka, Iksa, B. Tatosh, Brovka; Tartas, Sencha, Om, Icha.

Gravity drainage of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit into the indicated water receivers is possible provided that regul-

of small rivers and streams flowing out of the peat deposit, as well as clearing the headwaters of the main rivers.

Table 2 gives the principal indicators for draining the entire area of the sections under consideration (1,060 thousand ha—the Southern and Eastern sections, the “Kaitas,” “Kaurushka,” and “Lyachinskoye” peat deposits).

Table 2

The enormous peat reserves at the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit and their diversity open up broad possibilities for the integrated use of the peat deposit with the production of various types of products for many branches of the national economy: metallurgy, chemistry, power engineering, industrial and civil construction, municipal and household consumption, agriculture, and others.

Proceeding from the direction of development of the district’s national economy, the location of the deposit, and the quality of the peat deposit, we have considered the following possible directions for the use of the peat resources and areas of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit:

a) as fuel—in metallurgy and power engineering;

b) for the manufacture of peat heat-insulating boards—in construction;

c) as organic fertilizer and bedding—in agriculture;

d) for sowing agricultural crops.

According to preliminary considerations for determining the advisability of peat extraction on the basis of the sections of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit under consideration, it is possible to obtain the following types of peat products:

1. Milled peat of a conventional 40% moisture content—13 million tons for metallurgical purposes.

2. Heat-insulating boards—15% conventional moisture content—7.8 million m³ for construction organizations in cities and rural localities of Western Siberia.

1. Energy fuel—8 million tons—for a power station with a capacity of 1200 MW.

2. Peat briquettes at 12% conventional moisture content—120 thousand tons—for municipal and household institutions and the population of the future industrial center in the area of occurrence of the Bakchar iron ores, and for peat enterprises supplying peat to the combine.

The above production program is ensured over the course of the normal amortization period and fully satisfies the identified or calculated demand for peat.

1. Simultaneously with the extraction of peat to meet the needs of industry and the population, substantial areas of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit may be used as agricultural land.

There are 288 thousand hectares of such areas, and, taking into account shallow-deposit areas (margins), 410 thousand hectares may be brought under agricultural development.

The largest consumer of fuel peat may be the metallurgical combine planned for construction on the basis of the Bakchar iron-ore deposit.

In the industrial development of the Bakchar iron-ore deposit, the problem of metallurgical fuel is a very serious one. Modern blast furnaces operate on coke obtained from special grades of hard coal, the so-called coking coals. The principal supplier of these coals for the metallurgy of the Urals and Siberia has been, and remains, the Kuznetsk Coal Basin; at the same time, its reserves in Kuzbass at depths of 300 m amount to less than 3% of the total reserves of hard coal. Already at present there is a shortage of coking coals in the supply of the metallurgical plants of Siberia.

With the commissioning of new metallurgical plants, the situation with coking coals will become still more acute.

Under such conditions with metallurgical fuel, the enormous peat resources of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit, which form the cover of the Bakchar iron-ore deposit, may find broad application in metallurgy as fuel.

However, work being conducted in the field of the use of peat in metallurgy has not yet gone beyond the laboratory and pilot-industrial stage.

The results obtained make it possible to draw a preliminary conclusion on the possibility of using, as metallurgical fuel, peat coke and semi-coke, peat briquettes, and also milled peat in its natural form without preliminary thermal processing or treatment.

In the event of the successful completion of scientific-research work, the metallurgical direction of peat use—taking into account that the iron ores occur in immediate proximity to the peat deposits—may become decisive in the integrated use of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit. The expediency of using peat from this deposit for fertilizer and bedding can be determined only after consideration of the peat fund located on the territory of the consuming collective and state farms, or near them.

The fairly favorable distribution of numerous peat deposits across the territory of Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts will make it possible to meet a large part of the demand for fertilizers by organizing peat extraction in immediate proximity to the fields requiring organic fertilizers, and thereby reduce, as far as possible,

the main part of the cost of peat fertilizers—transportation costs.

The enormous reserves of bedding peat occurring in peat deposits located in various districts of Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts also give grounds to assume that a significant share of collective and state farms can be supplied with peat bedding from nearby peat deposits.

Consequently, the extraction of peat for fertilizers and bedding at the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit can be organized only for collective and state farms that do not have peat reserves on their own territory and are located at a distance from it not exceeding the maximum.

The use of peat products in the metallurgical industry will make it possible partially to cover the deficit of coking coals, while the use of peat insulating boards will enable Western Siberia partially to dispense with imports of expensive thermal-insulation materials and to reduce railway shipments significantly.

Consumption by the population and municipal-service enterprises of peat briquettes as domestic fuel in the amount of 120 thousand tons will provide an annual saving, for other national-economic purposes, of about 450–500 thousand \(m^3\) of stacked firewood.

The development of peat areas for sowing agricultural crops will make it possible to meet, to a considerable extent, the food needs of the prospective population in the area of the Bakchar industrial hub.

All that has been said above makes it possible to conclude that drainage of the considered sections of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit is expedient, provided that their peat reserves are used comprehensively.

In addition to the industrial and agricultural development of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit, forest drainage of lowland and transitional types of swampy forests is promising and expedient, since the soil under these conditions is richer and the effectiveness of drainage is comparatively high.

On raised-bog sections, especially those covered with stands of no economic significance or entirely open, drainage for the purpose of amelioration is inexpedient.

Open sections representing a lowland type of bogging also have low drainage effectiveness from the forestry point of view, since such sections have a considerable peat depth and require forest restoration.

When assigning sections for drainage, preference should be given to pine swamp forests, especially middle-aged ones, since in a number of districts of Tomsk and Novosibirsk oblasts a shortage of coniferous stands is already being felt.

For the considered sections of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit, it is expedient to designate 217 thousand ha for forest drainage, including 116 thousand ha in Novosibirsk Oblast and 101 thousand ha in Tomsk Oblast. These are mainly forest tracts located in the basins of the Bakchar, Iksa, Shegarka, Tartas, and Om rivers.

More than half of the stands (about 55%) recommended for drainage are pine stands—predominantly pure, maturing and mature, low-site-class, low-density stands with a total growing stock of 70–80 \(m^3/ha\).

Birch stands occupy 40% of the area and are represented mainly by mature, mixed, medium-density stands of site-quality classes III–IV, with a total growing stock of 90–100 \(m^3/ha\).

Cedar and spruce stands occupy 5% of the area and are represented by mixed, mature, low-site-quality (site-quality class III–IV), medium-density stands with a total stock of 120–150 \(m^3/ha\).

All of the above makes it possible to conclude that drainage and integrated development of the “Vasyuganskoye” peat deposit are advisable, with simultaneous integrated use of all the natural resources of the West Siberian Lowland.