Pike River Coal finds more mineable seams in Paparoa

Pike River Coal has the potential to expand its West Coast mine with an estimated 8 million tonnes of high-quality coal from three more seams.

Pike River, now extracting coal from the Brunner seam, says testing of the Paparoa seam 200m beneath it shows plenty of high-quality coal.

"It's a good sign; it's not definitive, we can't really base an economic model or a extraction sequence on it yet, but it's encouraging because it means that there is good-quality coal down there," said Peter Whittall, Pike River's general manager of mines.

"There is quite a lot of it."

Though previous lease holders such as New Zealand Oil and Gas knew the potential of the seam, the company was only aware of three seams, one of which was mineable.

But the Paparoa seam wasn't given much value because of the limited information available, until Pike River discovered there were nine small coal seams of which three are workable after it drilled a hole from the Brunner seam.

"It encourages us to drill more holes and continue to explore the Paparoa seam. There was more coal than projected," Whittall said.

Pike River Coal is doing more tests on the coal retrieved and will continue to explore over the next 18 months.

Whittall said he did not see any investment decisions on the Paparoa seam in the near future as the company was focused on its Brunner seam operations.

- NZPA