Union 103 mine

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South gate Union 103 mine

The Union 103 mine was a lignite mine near Morschenich in the Düren district . The plant existed from 1939 to 1955 and was then the largest underground lignite mine in the world.

history

In 1939 the "Rheinische Braunkohlentiefbaugesellschaft" was founded. The seams were too deep for the opencast mining technology at that time , so that mining in opencast mining would have been uneconomical. Therefore the mine field was aligned with a mine to the coal in large-scale test intraday break down . A daily extraction of around 10,000 tons of brown coal was planned, which, however, was never reached with an average of 200 tons per day.

The operational plan was approved on September 15, 1941. An interruption due to the Second World War did not take place until 1943. The shaft sinking began in 1948. 'Shaft 1' was completed in 1950 and 'Shaft 2' in 1953. In two bays , up to 330 meters drilled were and by an eleven kilometer long route network around 200 marched miners to 70 meters thick Braunkohleflöz to body. There was also a mine train underground .

Above all, the geological conditions did not permit economic mining, so that the experiment was ended after a few years. After a water ingress, the mine was closed in April 1955. The shafts were flooded in 1960 and then sealed with concrete slabs . In 1969 the buildings were demolished and the cellars filled.

In 2007 there were still around 23,000 tonnes of concrete, 915 tonnes of steel and 1,100 tonnes of pit timber in the earth in the area of ​​the shaft systems, which were required for the construction of eleven kilometers.

Reduction of the coal reserves by the Hambach opencast mine

In the years 2011 to 2025, the reserves will be extracted in an expansion of the Hambach opencast mine . In January 2014, the 6th level of the Hambach opencast mine reached the sections of the Union mine and exposed them. The Dürener Zeitung reported on November 19, 2016:

Hambach: Insights into the time of the underground mining in Morschenich. The view into the exposed tunnel opens a gate to the past. While one of the gigantic bucket-wheel excavators only a few hundred meters away extracts up to 240,000 tons of lignite a day from the 70-meter-thick seam of the Hambach opencast mine, the miners in this hollow space of just a few square meters in the mid-1950s extracted just 140 tons a day by hand; namely 300 meters deep in the earth, only protected from the masses of earth above them by a few centimeters thick reinforced concrete casing and a wooden panel. “At that time, two miners worked their way forward about one meter per shift,” explains Hans Peter Schöngen from the opencast mine operator RWE Power, who is the project manager responsible for the proper dismantling of the mine. No wonder that the Union 103 underground mine, which was completed at the beginning of the 1950s near Morschenich with two 330-meter-deep shafts, had to be closed again shortly after its commissioning due to a lack of profitability in 1955. In addition, there were repeated ingress of water, which made underground mining more difficult. What remains in the middle of today's Hambach opencast mine, next to the two shafts that have been torn down around 80 meters deep since 2011 with the advancing opencast mine, is an eleven-kilometer-long route network that is now exposed every four to five months. The mighty bucket wheel excavator approaches the tunnels up to about two meters, explains Tim Jaetzel, Head of Opencast Mine Planning. The remaining lignite is removed by crawler excavators. In the past two years, RWE employees have already exposed around 650 meters of the route network in this way, dismantled and disposed of separately according to concrete, steel and wood. Now another 235 meters are exposed. A laborious and expensive, but necessary process. Because the reinforced concrete cannot simply be picked up by the bucket wheel excavators. Its sharp edges would destroy the conveyor belts. And that's why RWE Power has to spend around half a million euros annually to properly remove the former mine. A total of 15 years are planned for the dismantling. According to the current state of planning, the coal excavator has reached the shafts of the former underground excavation not far from Morschenich in 2026. By then, around 50,000 cubic meters of concrete and masonry, 10,000 tons of gray cast iron and steel and around 6,000 cubic meters of pit timber will be required during dismantling. So far, the RWE experts have been spared any surprises when dismantling the former mine. The survey data recorded in the 1950s are so precise that the GPS-controlled bucket wheel excavator has so far been able to approach the route network without any problems. Like the two shafts, the majority of the routes have survived the decades almost unscathed, so that today's miners can get an exact picture of the work of their predecessors.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Abels: Opencast mining swallows the mine. Aachener Zeitung, July 3, 2009, accessed on January 16, 2014 .
  2. ↑ T. Meyer, P. Bergsch, H. Geich, G. Kirstein, H. Welsch: Merzenich (=  The series of archive images ). Sutton, Erfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-86680-580-4 , p. 28-30 .
  3. ↑ Jörg Abels: Unique. Opencast mining meets underground mine. Aachener Zeitung, May 6, 2011, accessed on January 16, 2014 .
  4. ↑ Hambach opencast mine. a mine is being excavated. Kölner Stadtanzeiger, January 15, 2014, accessed on January 16, 2014 .

literature

  • Johannes Mausbach: Union 103. The mine in the Bürgewald . Your Computer & Copy Shop, Elsdorf 2008 ( full text on dorf-etzweiler.de (PDF; 9.2 MB)).
  • Ralf Hempel, Bernd Houben: Dismantling and excavation of the Union 103 underground pit in the Hambach opencast mine . In: Proceedings of the 14th International Mining History Workshop Annaberg-Buchholz . S. 79-88 .

Web links

Coordinates: 50 ° 53 '23 "  N , 6 ° 32' 38.3"  E