Zülpich opencast mine

Zülpich opencast mine
	General information about the mine
other names	Pit victor
Mining technology	Open pit
	Information about the mining company
Operating company	Viktor Rolff KG
Start of operation	1952
End of operation	1969
	Funded raw materials
Degradation of	Brown coal
	Geographical location
Coordinates	50 ° 41 '50 " N , 6 ° 37' 31" E Coordinates: 50 ° 41 '50 " N , 6 ° 37' 31" E
	Location Zülpich opencast mine
Location	Zülpich
local community	Zülpich
District ( NUTS3 )	Euskirchen
country	State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Country	Germany
District	Rhenish lignite district

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The Zülpich open-cast mine (formerly open-cast mine or pit Victor ) is a former open-cast lignite mine or mining operation near Zülpich in the southwestern Rhenish district .

The mining company was the former Viktor Rolff KG , which continued to exist as Juntersdorf GmbH until December 14, 2015 and was based in Astreastr until the end of its liquidation in 2018. in Juntersdorf near Zülpich. From 1953 to 1969, lignite was mined in the mine near Zülpich, which was also known colloquially as "brown gold". The company's own briquette factory in the Fürstenberg mine near Frechen was initially supplied with the lignite extracted . Only later, from 1955, was a new briquette factory opened right near the Zülpich mine in Geich , to which a small lignite power plant was also connected. As a result, the very energy-intensive neighboring Zülpich paper mill (today's Smurfit-Kappa Zülpich paper mill ) in the village of Bessenich near Zülpich was supplied with electricity almost directly. A high dump was created near Zülpich near Juntersdorf to deposit the overburden .

Naming

The Victor mine is named after the owner of the mining company Victor Rolff .

Historical aspects

Historical origin in the 19th century

The opencast mine goes back to the lignite mining of the Astraea and Proserpina-Elisabeth mines in Juntersdorf near Zülpich, which had their origins as early as 1830. Even then, lignite was being mined in the Zülpich region, albeit with very little success. At that time, however, mining took place exclusively in underground mining , i.e. with the shafts and tunnels typical of mining .

Victor Pit (1953 to 1969)

At the beginning of the 1950s, as part of soil investigations near Zülpich, even larger deposits of lignite were discovered than was already known at the time of the former lignite mine near Juntersdorf. The volume of minable coal in the first soil layers alone, excluding the very deep layers that were technically inaccessible at the time, was estimated in advance at around 60 million tons. The preparatory drainage work was carried out in 1952. In 1953 the first coal mining took place. After a relatively short and therefore atypical operating time for the mining industry, mining operations were stopped again in 1969 for economic reasons.

On the one hand, the coal mined was used to manufacture briquettes in the directly neighboring briquette factory near Geich , which at that time was still widely used for heating in private households. On the other hand, the company's own lignite power station in Geich , which was built later, was directly supplied with energy.

A total of almost 500 people in Zülpich were directly or indirectly connected to the lignite industry. The jobs were not limited to the mining and processing of coal. On the contrary, numerous suppliers and other subcontractors from Zülpich were very closely connected to the opencast mine.

Recultivation of the pit and subsequent use of the areas and buildings (from 1969)

Recultivation of nature

After only a short time, the recultivation of the spoil dump near Juintersdorf by creating clover and grass meadows for sheep was already started while the open-cast mine was still active. Since the heap that was also created in the process was laid out in the shape of a staircase, on the one hand, in the plateau-like zones, agriculturally usable fields were created, and on the other, smaller slopes that were necessary to support the soil. These were then recultivated with trees and bushes.

Creation of quarry ponds

The Neffelsee , a Restlochsee of mine Victor in Zülpich in the mining field center (aerial photo from 2016, at the top left can be seen the village Geich with the site of the former briquette)

The water sports lake Zülpich , a so-called residual lake of the opencast mine Victor near Zülpich in the mining field south

While all strongly localnear areas could be around again used as fields to the urban area of Zülpich after filling, the two were then remaining mines by the nearby Neffelbaches and neighboring Vlattener creek gradually each at a quarry pond flooded. This is how today's two leisure lakes near Zülpich were created in the 1970s, namely on the one hand the Neffelsee between Zülpich and Füssenich as a nature conservation lake , and on the other hand the water sports lake Zülpich directly on today's eastern edge of Zülpich, which in 2014 made up the largest part of the State Garden Show in 2014 and is used today as a water sports and swimming lake, as well as a regional leisure park . The water sports lake Zülpich is popularly referred to as the Zülpich lake and until 2008 was completely owned by the mining company until the horticultural show parks there was set up for the state horticultural show.

Re-use of the premises of the briquette factory and the power plant

The premises of Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics Germany GmbH on the former site of the briquette factory near Geich near the north-western exit of Zülpich (aerial photo with a view to the north from 2016)

The buildings and the grounds of the closed briquette factory near Geich continued to be used, converted or demolished in a variety of ways after the open-cast mine was closed. In addition to smaller commercial enterprises, the site is currently home to a regional location for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics , which operates throughout Europe and specializes in car transport . On the former site of the briquette factory near Geich, the company has maintained a very large transshipment point for cars from the French automaker Renault for the delivery of new vehicles throughout Germany for years .

Archaeological importance

During the work in the pit, only a few lost and found items such as B. Coins from Constantinian times are publicly known and only relatively poorly recorded. In most cases, the finds went into private ownership, so that only a few finds could be brought to a museum or have even partially disappeared today in an inexplicable way.

Due to the fact that the records are sometimes completely missing or even inadequate, the exact number of sites is still completely unclear. The few reasonably proven and also particularly significant archaeological finds can be found in the following exemplary list.

Examples of significant finds from Roman times:

Five Roman settlements
A Roman cremation grave (with two glass vessels and other utensils)

Examples of important finds from the Middle Ages:

A late medieval court
A chapel (the find is not entirely certain, however)

Examples of important finds from modern times:

Finds destroyed or removed by open-cast lignite mining (located on the old course of the Neffelbach and already entered on the Tranchot map from 1808):
- The Biessenmühle * The "oil mill

Finds preserved to this day as a monument (as the location of the finds was on the so-called mining edge )
- The Luisges Mill
The Jewish cemetery (since the 17th century this has been about 250 meters west of the Weier Gate; in 1958 225 graves were reburied in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Ehrenfeld )

Technical systems and buildings

Drainage systems

For the purpose of draining the pit, complicated drainage systems were created by hand in underground tunnels at a depth of approx. 40 meters. In addition to the general drainage of the overlying soil layers by means of a filter well , this underground system also extracted the water from the coal. In this case, however, unlike what is otherwise usual, the associated well systems only emitted water downwards and not upwards. As a result, the water initially always reached the so-called pump sump as the lowest point of the drainage system and was only then pumped back up using centrifugal pumps after a brief cleaning .

Own railway line

The Düren circular railway from the indirectly neighboring town of Düren opened a new railway connection to the town of Embken near Zülpich in 1911 on the occasion of the original opencast mine in Zülpich . On the way there, there was also the pit of the opencast mine near Füssenich and a first briquette factory near Geich , whereby both the pit and the factory were connected directly to the route via their own tracks.

However, since the actual capacity utilization of the railway line with goods was considerably below the original forecast, the line was closed again at the beginning of 1957 as part of the expansion of the Victor mine . Far before that, the original previous open-cast mine was discontinued in 1920 and an older previous briquette factory near Geich was also closed.

Conveyor belts streets

After the mined coal, initially in a waste train had been transported, this was followed very quickly by large conveyor belts made of rubber replaced. These conveyor belts have a total length of about 10 kilometers and then went directly into the briquetting plant or the waste tailings piles . In the briquette factory, the still untreated coal was initially temporarily stored in a bunker with a capacity of approx. 4,500 cubic meters . Such a constantly available minimum amount of coal should not only serve as a store, but also as a safety reserve for possible breakdowns of the conveyor lines.

The conveyor belt system was seen as one of the most modern systems in lignite mining in Europe at that time, and was therefore also a popular study object for numerous - and even foreign - experts.

Special excavator

Since the lignite could only be found at a depth of approx. 60 meters, mining had to be carried out in two lines with a 417 tonne and a smaller bucket wheel excavator and a bucket chain excavator . The coal was then extracted in "pivoting mode" around an imaginary pivot point was continued around.

Briquette factory

For a short time, the extracted lignite was transported to the company's own briquette factory in the Fürstenberg mine near Frechen , which was relatively far away at the time . On October 12, 1955, an in-house briquette factory was opened right next to the mine in Geich. The factory worked in three shifts and produced around 1,300 tons of briquettes per day, which were either transported by freight train for long-distance sales or by truck for sale on the regional market.

coal-fired power station

The coal-fired power plant with two different-sized turbines , which is spatially directly connected to the briquette factory, supplied the briquette factory and the nearby paper factory as well as the power grid of the then regional power producer RWE . The operation of the briquette plant and the power plant earned the city of Zülpich one of the highest ranks in terms of tax revenue among the taxable municipalities in what was then the Düren district.

Spoil dump

To the west of Juntersdorf, on the former predecessor of the Astraea mine , a high dump was set up "to overturn the overburden from the Zülpich opencast mine. The Astraea mine was completely covered by the Juntersdorf outer dump .

Geological and geographical aspects

Special feature of the coal reserves

The underground mine was one of the youngest, smallest and most modern in the area. It was created at a time when the age of large open-cast mines had already dawned elsewhere, as was already embodied in the indirectly neighboring Frechen open-cast mine at the time . The relatively small mine near Zülpich had to struggle with major problems right from the start, as the coal lay significantly deeper here at 60 to 70 meters, and also the coal-rich layers - the seam - which are only approx. 8 meters thick, are less thick than was the case with many other open-cast mines at the time. This resulted in a ratio of overburden to coal that was significantly less favorable compared to other pits and thus brought with it the potential danger of the pit being closed for economic reasons from the start.

Location of the mining areas

The open-cast mine extended over a total area of around 170 hectares. Some areas of the central mining field ended just a few meters from today's Park am Wallgraben or the historic city wall in the area of the medieval Weiertor of Zülpich.

The open-cast mine was divided into two separate fields in the middle and south :

field	Location to districts (coordinates with cardinal direction)	Dismantling time from	Dismantling time until	Reclamation
center	between Zülpich-Zentrum (SO),Geich(NO),Füssenich(N) andJuntersdorf(W)50.697222222222 6.6252777777778	1952/53	1969	flooded with the help of the Neffelbach ; today Neffelsee or nature conservation lake Füssenich
south	between Zülpich-Zentrum (NW) andLövenich(SO)50.68 6.6647222222222	1952/53	1969	flooded with the help of the Vlattener Bach ; today water sports lake Zülpich

Web links

Individual evidence

[1] ttps://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessionid=000572B4EC39CBE48F21387AF51DD8CA.web02-1

[2] Brown coal on the outskirts of the Roman town of Zülpich at www.wisoveg.de

[3] ttps://www.kuladig.de/Objektansicht/KLD-297039

[4] Kölner Stadtanzeiger from July 11, 2008: Mining history of the Voreifel. "Astraea" and "Proserpina-Elisabeth"

[5] ttps://www.zuelpich.de/juntersdorf/178-geschichte19.html

[6] Wündisch, Fritz: Brown coal mining near Euskirchen. From the “Abelsgrube” and from the “Clemafin” pit. Local calendar of the Euskirchen district, 1966 at http://www.wisoveg.de

[7] Heusler, Conrad: Description of the Brühl-Unkel mining area and the lignite basin on the Lower Rhine . Editing on behalf of the Royal Oberbergamtes zu Bonn, Bonn: Marcus, 1897

[8] ttps://www.zuelpich.de/index.php/78-tourismus/wassersportsee/309-wassersportsee-nun-im-eigentum-der-stadt-zuelpich.html

[9] ttps://www.kuladig.de/Objektansicht/KLD-297039

[10] ttps://www.zuelpich.de/index.php/78-tourismus/wassersportsee/309-wassersportsee-nun-im-eigentum-der-stadt-zuelpich.html

[11] ttps://www.zuelpich.de/geich/170-geschichte14.html

[12] ttps://www.kuladig.de/Objektansicht/KLD-297039

[13] ttps://www.zuelpich.de/geich/170-geschichte14.html

[14] ttps://www.kuladig.de/Objektansicht/KLD-297039