United Ville

United Ville
General information about the mine
Mining technology	Open pit
Information about the mining company
Operating company	United Ville Union; later Roddergrube ; later Rhine brown
Employees	1231 (Oct. 1936)
Start of operation	1901
End of operation	1988
Successor use	partly as a garbage dump
Funded raw materials
Degradation of	Brown coal
Geographical location
Coordinates	50 ° 50 '29.2 "  N , 6 ° 50' 32.1"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 50 '29.2 "  N , 6 ° 50' 32.1"  E
Location United Ville
Location	Knapsack
local community	Huerth
District ( NUTS3 )	Rhein-Erft district
country	State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Country	Germany
District	Rhenish lignite district

The pit United Ville is a former lignite - opencast mining in the Ville between Liblar and Knapsack in the Rhenish mining area . The pit served to supply the briquette factories of the same name and the Goldenberg power station .

Funding has been discontinued since 1988. A large part of the charred open pit has been used as a landfill since 1970 . The remaining Ville field was recultivated ; the last dismantled Ville-Nordfeld was left to its own devices and is to develop into a nature reserve .

history

Lignite mining

United Ville opencast mine in the Rhenish lignite mining area

The United Ville union was formed around 1900 as a merger of seven smaller, previously unused mining concessions in the Royal State Forest of Ville under the leadership of Friedrich Eduard Behrens , the chairman of the board and the main trades of the Brühler Roddergrube . Under the technical direction of the mine director Albrecht Konrad Piatscheck, the union opened the new United Ville mine and built the first briquette factory in 1901, which was put into operation in 1902 and supplied with coal from the mine.

At that time, the open pit was the second largest mine in the area. The seam was up to 75 meters thick under a surface layer of only 12 meters - an extremely favorable ratio of overburden to coal compared to today's values .

Due to sales difficulties and the corresponding financial problems of the main trade in Behrens, all Kuxe of the United Ville union were taken over by the Brühler Roddergrube in 1906 . The mine was continued as the United Ville department . In 1912, the Roddergrube signed a long-term coal supply contract with the Rheinisch-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerk (RWE), which secured the fuel supply for its Berggeist power plant and the newly projected Vorgebirgszentrale power plant (later renamed the Goldenberg power plant ).

Briquette press Ville I of the briquette factory Ville I in Knapsack, built in 1915

By 1914, four other factories (United Ville II to V) were built next to the briquette factory built in 1901 . The United Ville briquette factories had a workforce of 1,231 on October 1, 1936. This was followed by a complex industrial area from 1906 in which, in addition to the power plant, the foothills of the mountains was located. From 1914, as an important coal buyer, the first chemical company established a calcium cyanamide factory of the Deutsche Carbid-Aktiengesellschaft. Forerunner of the stock corporation for nitrogen fertilizers. (later Hoechst AG , today the Knapsack Chemical Park together with other companies ).

In the north, before Berrenrath , a sixth briquette factory, the Berrenrath briquette factory , was built shortly before the First World War . The mining field in the north adjoining the United Ville, the Berrenrath opencast mine , was acquired by the Roddergrube at an early stage.

For many years, the Ville opencast mine delivered its coal via two inclined elevators , until 1924 with chain conveyors , whose lorries were loaded from the excavator, directly to the aforementioned power plants and factories. Since then, the inclined lifts A and B have been used to pull open-plan cars. The sale of the briquettes and the delivery to the rest of the region, for example also processed coal for the Wesseling hydrogenation plant , took place via the railway connection to the Villebahn .

From 1970 a charred part of the opencast mine was used as a landfill (see below).

In 1975 dismantling in the main field was postponed and four of the five briquette factories that had received their coal from other open-cast mines in the area after the closure of the United Ville mine were temporarily postponed and finally stopped production. The buildings were demolished from autumn 1991. The last remaining one became the Ville / Berrenrath coal refining plant , which today grinds lignite for large-scale industrial dust firing .

In 1983 coal production in the Ville-Restfeld was resumed for a short time. The final shutdown took place in 1988.

Subsequent use as a landfill

Knapsack hazardous waste dump, in the background the former household waste dump

From 1970 the city of Cologne took over part of the charred main field in order to create a landfill for household and bulky waste . For over 30 years this was the primary landfill for Cologne's municipal waste, until a waste incineration plant was built in Cologne in 1998 due to legal regulations .

The landfill was then taken over by the Cologne waste disposal and recycling company (AVG), a subsidiary of the Cologne municipal utility , which now primarily stored commercial and industrial waste here.

This use ended in 2005 due to an amendment to the TA Siedlungsabfall . Since then, only minimally organically contaminated mineral waste such as earth, building rubble, ash, etc. (landfill class II) has been stored on the landfill.

The landfill gas produced in the former landfill is collected via 220 "gas wells" and fed to the neighboring Goldenberg power station , where it is used in gas engines to generate electricity.

literature

• Walter Buschmann , Norbert Gilson, Barbara Rinn: Lignite mining in the Rhineland. ed. from LVR and MBV-NRW , 2008, ISBN 978-3-88462-269-8 .
• Helmut Neßeler: The history of the United Ville briquette factory in Knapsack. In: Hürther Heimat. 76 (1997) p. 79 ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} City of Hürth: Energy and Chemistry Center - ECC KNAPSACK. ( Memento of the original from November 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 2.1 MB) 
2. ^ ^{A b c} AVG waste disposal and recycling company Cologne mbH: United Ville landfill
3. ↑ Dirk Böttcher : Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon: from the beginnings to the present. Schlütersche, 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 .
4. ↑ Piatscheck, Albrecht Konrad on: www.uni-magdeburg.de
5. ↑ Volker HW Schüler, Manfred Coenen: The Briquette Production in the Rhenish Brown Coal District. on: www.dbhverlag.de
6. ↑ Walter Buschman: The Goldenberg plant in Hürth. on: www.rheinische-industriekultur.de
7. ↑ Helmut Enkler: The United Ville 1901-1976 (second part). In: Hürther Heimat 39/40 (1977) p. 11, quoted in: Helmut Neßeler: Die Geschichte. P. 85.
8. ^ Karl-Günter Flohr: Operating history of the Berrenrath opencast mine. ( Memento from September 5, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
9. ↑ ^{a b c} Helmut Neßeler: RBW Narrow Gauge Railway Ville - Narrow Gauge Railways in Hiding - A Visit to the Knapsack Industrial Area. 1983.
10. ^ RWE Power AG: Factory Ville / Berrenrath