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The room and pillar sections are laid out with a multiple -entry development system. A series of <br />rooms and crosscuts will then be mined from the main entries on a spacing to be determined by <br />prevailing geologic conditions. Coal will be cut by continuous miners. <br />At the completion of a panel of rooms, and if conditions allow, the intervening pillars will be <br />extracted, retreating towards the mains. The extraction of most of the pillar coal on the retreat <br />will result in caving of the roof some 50 to 100 feet behind the active mining area. Upon <br />completion of a room and pillar section, the caved area will be sealed off and protected with <br />adequate barrier pillars. <br />BME has designed the mining system to permit the optimum recovery of the coal reserves in the <br />safest and most economical manner. The mining system for the Deserado Mine is primarily the <br />longwall mining method. Some part of the deposit may be worked using the room and pillar <br />(with pillar extraction) mining method. The areas close to the outcrop on the south of the mining <br />area were unsuitable for longwall mining due to the low overburden height. Room and pillar <br />panels RP -1 and RP -2 in the D Seam were excluded from longwall mining because the boundary <br />geometry did not allow longwall mining. <br />With the submittal of PR -08, BME will add 1,656.3 acres to the currently approved permit area. <br />BME will be adding Federal Coal Lease COC -74813 to add the 1,656.3 acres of coal to the <br />Deserado Mine plan. The additional 1,656.3 acres will allow the Deserado Mine to continue <br />development work in the B -Seam, extending longwall panels 13 and 14, allowing the completion <br />of longwall panel 15, and adding 13 additional panels. These additional longwall panels will <br />extend the current life of the mine from 2017 to approximately 203 1. <br />Coal Transportation and Processing Waste <br />Raw coal is transported out of the mine by conveyor to the DB -Portal Area wash plant where <br />the coal is crushed and cleaned. The coal is then transported 3.1 miles to the rail loadout facility <br />via an over -land conveyor system. The coal is conveyed to the slot storage building, which can <br />store up to 25,000 tons of coal. From this building, coal is conveyed one third of one mile to the <br />loadout area. Clean coal is then transported by rail to the Bonanza Power Plant in Vernal, Utah. <br />The rail loop and facilities within the rail loop were removed from the permit and the <br />reclamation plan with the approval of Permit Revision 04. The loadout tower remains in the <br />permit and reclamation plan, as do all of the structures that convey the coal to the rail loop. <br />BME will keep all operations related to the mining operations and the loading and transporting <br />of coal separate. <br />Coal processing waste generated at the wash plant facility is trucked approximately 3.6 miles to <br />the refuse disposal area located east of the rail loadout in the northeast portion of the permit area. <br />The refuse disposal area includes eleven subareas of refuse deposition. The first subarea (RP -1) <br />was reclaimed in late 1990, implementing a revegetation study that involved variations from the <br />required four feet of cover. Combined Refuse Area RP -2/3/4 and the adjacent Refuse Area RP- <br />5A are currently active. The remaining subareas have not yet been developed. <br />23 <br />