3 Coal Mines In 3 Days | Electricity for 1 MILLION People | North American Coal

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This vlog hails all the way from beautiful Beulah, North Dakota where the crew and I followed along with North American Coal to visit 3 coal mines in 3 days.

First Site: “Coyote Creek” Mine - We visited the “Wile E. Coyote” dragline to see how it gets moved from point A to point B across the mine.

NOTE: It’s powered by a massive extension cable that is carried by a farming tractor so it doesn’t get run over when the dragline is being moved.

Second Site: The “Freedom” Mine - A very large mine that produces coal for a power plant, a gasification plant, and then another power plant down the road. (It’s been there since the ’70s..) This is a massive operation equipped with 123-yard dragline buckets that roll 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with three people running each dragline.

They also run two types of Kress Coal Haulers (the 200-ton and 300-ton). The craziest part is that a lot of these machines have more than 100,000 hours on them!

Third Site: The “Falkirk” Mine - About an hour north of Bismarck that feeds a power plant right next door that’s all lignite coal. (it’s also been around since the ’70s…) The coolest part was the indoor building where they park all of their haul trucks (789’s and 793’s) The facility is about the size of a football field, and the trucks are all loaded by shovels out.

They then take the coal out of the pit and drive it all the way down the haul road and dump everything into a hopper, which is then crushed to make the coal a little more consistent. Then it’s thrown into a silo that feeds the power plant the coal. This is turned into energy for 750,000 houses and over 1 million people!

To wrap it all up…

The Coal Mining Process (Explained): It comes in segments. At the front, you have scrapers, dozers, and a PC2000 with trucks taking the topsoil and subsoil off and moving it to where the reclamation is at.

Next, the first little bit of overburden is stripped off to prepare for the dragline.

Then, the dragline comes through and exposes the coal, flops the material onto where they’ve already mined it, then the coal is moved to the power plant where it’s turned into electricity!

If you want to learn more about North American Coal, check them out at https://www.nacoal.com/. #coal #mining #construction

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-VIDEO CHAPTERS-
0:00 - Intro
1:19 - The Dragline
2:31 - Coal Mining Process
3:53 - Day 2
4:46 - Freedom Mine
5:37 - Draglines
6:15 - Standing in a Bucket
6:51 - Working
7:30 - Day 3
8:04 - Haul Truck Cave
9:27 - Outro