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Infrastruktura - ¦rodowisko - Energia
Dodatek lobbingowy do "RZECZPOSPOLITEJ".
9 wrze¶nia 2008 r.
po polsku
The Unemployed Potential of the Polish Mining
prof. Antoni Tajdu¶, Rector of the AGH University of Science and Technology, Chairman of the Steering Committee Developing the Legnica Mining and Energy Centre for Brown Coal
 Polish mining has all assets for the far-reaching development which could ensure safe energy sector in our country as well as provide minerals essential for good progress in many industrial branches.
I mean specifically hard and brown coal mining, production of copper, salt, zinc and lead, sulfur, crude oil and gas as well as mining other minerals useful in energy and building industries, road construction, cement, limestone and ceramic industries, and many other fields. Our country can boast of reputable technical higher schools which offer education on the highest world-standard level in various domains. Together with professionally qualified personnel, they make it possible to conduct the whole extensive geological and mining process from the moment of searching resources and their documentation, to planning, constructing and exploitation of mines through the underground, opencast and pit hole excavation. Thus prepared staff works not only for the scientific and project institutions, but also for many companies which provide subsidiary technical support for mining, automatics, electrical and machine ingineering. Our specialists are greatly valued in the world, and they are working in mines, design offices, and mining subsidiary companies on all continents all over the world. Polish companies associated to mining industry are perceived abroad as these of great potential and specialistic know-how. The AGH-UST alone, not to count Silesian and Wrocław Politechnics, holds a scientific treasure which is 200 professors representing various scientific fields related to geology, geophisics, geodesy, geotechnics, drilling, mining, machine engineering, energy industry as well as environmental engineering, environmental science and economy of mining. No other university in the world has such a scientific potential.
Another Poland’s noteworthy asset are natural resources which are plentiful in our country. We have enormous resources for energy production. Polish coal may supplement fuel stock for Europe which has become more and more dependent on imported energy. No doubt, the potential of Polish mining should be properly employed. Now is the right moment to plan such development. Polish mining industry is an extremely attractive investment opportunity, also for the foreigners. In this situation, we can not assume that we will evade foreign investments. That would be an absurd, anyway, not to use the potential that others appreciate. However, one should be aware of another aspect, namely the fact that mining industry has a status of a strategic sector, crucial for energy production stability both for the country itself and for numerous industry segments. Building new mines, new working floors in the existing ones, the appropriate technological and scientific support make a big chance for the country. If foreign investors can see profits in Polish mines, why shouldn’t we? We only need to change the approach, we need to adopt a long perspective thinking, we must find courage to invest, because the money invested will pay off for sure. Perhaps, such undertakings as the 21st World Mining Congress will help. Specialists of mining industry from all over the world will review most important issues for the Polish and world mining, will redefine its objectives, will discuss modern trends, will exchange precious views on challenges and opportunities for the future. Surely, the Congress will be observed by investors who await opinions on the global and local situation in mining. This is what the Congress motto says: “New challenges and perspectives for mining". Such encounters, as usual, are the occasion to talk, to draw attention to the problems, to diagnose them and to look together for new solutions. That is why we should make the most of them! As the Congress is held in several cities - Cracow, Katowice, Lubin, Bełchatów and Wieliczka - we have a chance to present ourselves in various contexts focusing on the situation of Polish mines, achievements of Polish science and mining, and also to bring to light long mining traditions and its esteem grounded by our ancestors. It would be an unpardonable mistake to lose this heritage, to ignore the opportunities that lay ahead Polish mining today.
Polish mining has been struggling for years with one major problem: too much politics, too little action.
Successive political orientations push forward their ideas on how to heal energy sector, forgetting one crucial matter: regardless political options, Polish energy sector needs one coherent strategy carefully executed by subsequent governments within dozens of years. It is the only way to change something. We must not lose time for fruitless visions.
Being in posession of enormous high quality resources, we can successfully guarantee stability of energy production in Poland. By building new mines and power plants, we can ensure thousands of new workplaces and visibly stimulate economic growth of the country. Specialists from mining industry are aware of its potential, and also for that reason we have founded at the AGH-UST a society to support mine building. We are also active in a community innitiative Committee for development and management of brown coal resources in the Legnica basin. The main idea of that undertaking was to combine the interdisciplinary work in order to take advantage of Polish minerals’ rich deposits. Priority is the country’s safety which in the light of ever-growing coal import from Russia reveals a hazardous tendency to decrease coal exploitation here, in Poland. If we plan to diminish our depenedance on supplies from abroad, we must immediately prepare the strategy for this endeavour. The new strategy should consider both hard and brown coal. The plan for security in energy sector, on the other hand, should clearly indicate solutions for specific problems, including for example new application of hard coal in energy production other than burning. Quickly growing prices of gas and oil should urge us to use rich deposits of hard and brown coal for gas and liquid fuels’ production. Many specialists’s work results in introducing innovative projects such as building a power plant which omits the problem of burning due to the plant’s higher efficiency. Nowadays, power plants’ productivity in Poland amounts up to 30-36 per cent only, while its equivalent in the world is 45-50 per cent. It is a big and meanigful difference. Higher efficiency means less carbon dioxide. At the AGH-UST there are many projects being developed which employ new clean coal technologies, among others the project of coal burning in full synergy with nuclear power. This project would meet two goals at the same time: firstly, would gradually introduce the idea of nuclear power as one of elements for the stability in the country’s energy industry. Secondly, it would enable using coal as an ecological and clean source of energy. The principle of burning coal in full synergy with nuclear power is very simple. We use specially built high-temperature reactors in order to transform and heat the coal. Thus, we omit the process of burning which consumes part of energy and we replace it with the process of heating up to, say, 900 degrees Celcius. Heating the coal leads to releasing various types of hydrocarbons. Also, in the same temperature water decomposes into oxygen and hydrogen. Burning takes place only at the momnet of hydrogen accumulation which guarantees burning effectiveness higher than in traditional methods. The result? New future for the Polish coal. Such direction should be adopted also in the national strategy for mining sector - to find modern and prospective solutions that would become the strength of Polish energy and to use the potential of the specialists, whose knowledge and professional skills are forged, among others, at the AGH-UST. n
www.agh.edu.pl
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