One of the benefit's of the punch longwall system being used at Beltana is that it does not require mains development, which will help reduce manning levels to about 100, compared to the 150 workers employed at South Bulga.

The mine is targeting productivity levels of around 40,000 tonnes per person per year.

Longwall mining at Beltana is scheduled to commence in April 2003, two months after the completion of mining at South Bulga, at an initial target of 4-4.4 million tonnes - despite the two-month production outage - before ramping up to full capacity of 5Mt in 2004.

Production at South Bulga is expected to fall to 4Mt this year, from 4.36Mt in 2001.

Beltana hosts recoverable reserves of 20.8Mt run of mine coal.