Walbeck potash plant

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Walbeck potash plant
General information about the mine
Union Walbeck 1906.JPG
Factory view of the Walbeck mine in 1906
other names Gerhard, Buchberg
Mining technology Chamber construction
Rare minerals Sylvine , Kieserite , Carnallite
Information about the mining company
Operating company Burbach-Kaliwerke AG
Start of operation 1904
End of operation 1925
Successor use U-shift
Funded raw materials
Degradation of Potash salt
Potash salt

Seam name

Staßfurt
Mightiness 2-27
Raw material content 30-48%
Greatest depth 520 m
overall length 7000 m
Geographical location
Coordinates 52 ° 17 '51 "  N , 11 ° 1' 38"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 17 '51 "  N , 11 ° 1' 38"  E
Walbeck potash plant (Saxony-Anhalt)
Walbeck potash plant
Location of the Walbeck potash plant
local community Oebisfelde-Weferlingen, Grasleben
District ( NUTS3 ) Börde, Helmstedt
country State of Saxony-Anhalt
Country Germany
District Magdeburg-Halberstadt potash district

Site plan of the factory facilities in 1906

The Kaliwerk Walbeck is a former mine with an attached factory for the production of potash fertilizer salts in Walbeck and Grasleben , district of Börde in Saxony-Anhalt and district of Helmstedt in Lower Saxony .

Immediately before and during the Second World War there was an underground armaments factory . In the final years of the war, forced laborers were used in the facilities from a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp near the mine .

geology

The formation of the salt dome in the upper Allertal

The salt dome of the upper Allertal is one of around 200 known deposits of this type in northern Germany. The salt layers from which this was created formed at the time of the Zechstein around 260 million years ago when seawater evaporated in a shallow basin. This process was repeated several times, so that various alternating layers of rock salt , potash salts and anhydrite were created through supersaturation and precipitation processes . The salt layers were later covered by further deposits and are now at a depth of around 3000 m . In a weak zone between two mountain floes, the salts have penetrated the slopes of the red sandstone (→ halokinesis ). The salt in the upper part of the salt dome was dissolved and washed away by the groundwater. Hardly soluble anhydrite and clay remained . These formed the so-called gypsum hat over the actual salt deposit.

Geographical location and extent

The salt dome of the upper Allertal extends along the Aller glacial valley about 10 km east of Helmstedt in a southeast-northwest direction over a length of about 40 to 50 km from Eilsleben in Saxony-Anhalt to Grasleben in Lower Saxony. The average width is 2 km. The Lappwald forms the western boundary . It is assumed that the Rothenfelde salt dome is the continuation of a Zechstein saddle, to which the salt dome of the upper Allertal also belongs.

mineralogy

The overburden above the salt dome is formed from clay layers from the Pleistocene . The salt level is about 300 meters deep. The salt dome consists mainly of rock salt with anhydrite and potassium salt deposits, which can consist of sylvin , sylvinite , hard salts or carnallite . The salt deposit is tectonically very strongly folded.

History and technology

Revelation story

The origin of the Walbeck potash plant goes back to the merchant Gerhard Korte . Korte founded the drilling company Gott mit uns in 1889 to search for potash salts between Weferlingen and Eilsleben. After the test drillings at Walbeck and Beendorf were crowned with success, Korte bought the disused, 1000-part Burbach trade union in Siegerland to relocate it to Beendorf. This was a legal trick to bypass the Prussian state reservation.

From 1897 to 1899, the Burbach union sank the Marie mine as the first potash mine near Beendorf .

Walbeck mine (Gerhard)

Geological profile of the Gerhard shaft

In August 1902, work began on shaft II of the Burbach union at the location of borehole XII. This was named Schacht Gerhard after Korte himself . Water inflows occurred up to a depth of 65 meters, which could be successfully sealed with an iron segmental lining extending over 84 meters . While the shaft depth was 54 meters on January 1, 1903, by the end of the year it was 262 meters. There the shaft stood in anhydrous layers of clay and plaster . After solid anhydrite was drilled through between 290 and 301 meters, the younger rock salt was reached on February 3, 1904. The first potash deposit consisting of sylvine, sylvinite and hard salt was found at a depth of 346 meters. It was 17 meters thick and dipped in at 33 gon . There, for further exploration, three stretches with a seigeren distance of 9 meters (at 343, 352 and 361 meters depth) and a striking length of 35 meters were driven. The potash store was proven to be of unchanged quality.

Obviously, the good salt outcrops in the Gerhard shaft led to a field cession of 28.6 million m² (13 Prussian normal fields ) in the communities of Bischofswald , Döhren , Groß Bartensleben , Walbeck and Weferlingen and the establishment of the independent trade union Walbeck in March 1904 Majority of 550 of the 1000 Kuxe of the Walbeck union in the hands of the Burbach union. The board was established by the Korte couple (chairman Gerhard Korte) from Magdeburg , as well as Dr. Adolph List from Magdeburg and bank director H. Willers from Essen . The commercial court entry took place in June 1904.

The construction of the shaft was continued under the direction of the Burbach union. After the erection of the steel headframe , work continued well and at the end of 1904 the projected final depth of 420 meters was reached. The shaft was made of brick up to 406 meters , filling locations were set at 360 and 420 meters depth. Crosscuts were then driven from the conveyor floors to the field. A total of four potash stores were approached over a striking length of 128 meters on the 360 ​​m level. The thicknesses were 27, 17, 6 and 2 meters, the potassium chloride content between 20 and 48%.

Since the high-percentage sylvine deposit was also found on the 420-meter level, a pillar height of 60 meters could be provided for the dismantling planning . In addition, there was a 27-meter-thick carnallite seam with 20% KCl on this level 96 meters west of the shaft. The device was so far completed at the beginning of 1906, so that the the potash planned in Verhieb could be taken.

Despite the spin-off of the Walbeck union, it was included in the Burbach union's participation in the German Potash Indicator until the end of 1909 . From a business perspective, there was a lease between the Walbeck mine and the Burbach trade union.

Technical equipment and operational procedures

The Walbeck mine had a main delivery with a valve-controlled twin steam hoisting machine and 368 kW (500 PS) output. With a payload of 2.4 tons and 70 conveying cycles, 168 tons could be conveyed in the shift. The auxiliary conveyance lifted a payload of 7.2 tonnes per shift (12 conveying cycles) at 0.6 tonnes. The crude salt was fed to the two grinding systems with a total of 1,500 tons of daily output via the wagon circulation located 8.75 meters above the hanging lawn bench . The ground material was loaded directly onto railway wagons, the colliery station was directly connected to the Helmstedt – Oebisfelde railway line via a siding .

There was an electric pit ventilator next to the shaft, which sucked 2500 m³ of used weather per hour out of the pit.

A boiler house with six steam boilers and an electrical center with a 368 kW (500 PS) and a 221 kW (300 PS) steam engine , each with coupled generators, were available for energy supply .

There were also chew , office, workshop and warehouse buildings on the 68,158 m² shaft plot . The kaue was connected to the shaft hall by a closed bridge.

In the period that followed, a potassium chlorine factory was built to process carnallite salts. The operator was Chemische Fabrik Walbeck GmbH , a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Walbeck union. The final liquors flowed into the Elbe via a joint line with the neighboring mines Braunschweig-Lüneburg , Bartensleben and Ummendorf-Eilsleben .

Buchberg mine

At the trade union meeting on December 12, 1908, the decision was made to sink a second day shaft. The Buchberg shaft was completed in 1913 with a final depth of 520 meters.

Decommissioning and reuse

Operation of the Walbeck potash plant was discontinued in 1925. The two pits Walbeck (Gerhard) and Buchberg remained open. In the mid-1930s, an armaments production facility for the Wehrmacht was set up in the mine ; Among other things, engines from the Braunschweig company Büssing-NAG were manufactured underground . The Walbeck shaft was given the code name Gazelle I and the Buchberg Gazelle II shaft .

Soviet pioneers blew up both pits on October 26, 1946. A funnel was created at the Walbeck shaft, and the masses falling into the shaft sealed it off. Despite this, masses of water penetrated the pit through the Buchberg shaft and drowned it. Fears that the lye would transfer to the Braunschweig-Lüneburg and Bartensleben plants were not fulfilled.

All daytime facilities were demolished and the colliery grounds leveled.

Current condition (2012)

The only reminder of the Walbeck shaft directly on the Helmstedt-Oebisfelde railway line and the state border between Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony, as well as northwest of today's Weferlingen quartz works , is the water-filled crater in the shaft.

The Buchberg shaft north-west of Walbeck can still be recognized by its walled-up shaft closure structure.

On the Lower Saxony side in Grasleben on Walbecker Straße there is the former residential colony of the miners of the Walbeck potash plant.

literature

  • Dietrich Fulda: Kali: The colorful, bitter salt . VEB German publishing house for basic industry, Leipzig 1990, p. 78 .
  • Dietrich Hoffmann: Eleven decades of German potash mining . Glückauf, Essen 1972, p. 74-75, 120 .
  • Rainer Slotta : The potash and rock salt industry . In: Technical monuments in the Federal Republic of Germany . tape 3 . German Mining Museum, Bochum 1980, p. 369-372 .
  • Thomas Reuter: The shafts of potash mining in Germany . In: Stadtverwaltung Sondershausen (ed.): SONDERSHÄUSER HEFTE on the history of the potash industry . No. 13 . City administration Sondershausen, Department of Culture, Sondershausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-9811062-3-7 , p. 41, 182 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Germany's Potash Industry No. 24, 1906 . Free supplement to "Industrie", daily newspaper for coal, potash and ore mining from Wednesday, August 15, 1906, p. 163
  2. ↑ Germany's Potash Industry No. 27, 1906 . Free supplement to "Industrie", daily newspaper for coal, potash and ore mining from Wednesday, September 5, 1906, pp. 177–180

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