Centennial, which has been the overall winner for the last two years, won the highly commended award in the safety category for its spyder longwall face drill in use at Angus Place Colliery near Lithgow.

Illawarra Coal won the highly commended award in the health category for helping workers lower their occupational health exposure risk through a new testing regime for standard personal protective equipment to ensure it fits individual users.

Bespoke solutions were developed where standard gear was not suitable.

“These winners are not just tweaking old ideas or adapting existing technologies, they have proven themselves to be true innovators and have shown again why New South Wales miners are world class,” NSW Minerals Council chief executive Nikki Williams said.

“The ideas that have been on show required thinking ‘outside the square’

“The end result is tools, applications and techniques that have the potential to be shared across the industry and the community.”

Centennial chief operating officer Steve Bracken told ILN the Angus Place spyder would improve safety at the longwall face.

“On a longwall face when you get broken roof material or roof cavities forming you generally have to inject some polyurethane resin into that ground to stabilise it,” he said.

“So what has happened in the past is that an operator needs to get out on the longwall face to assist with changing drill steels and injecting the material.”

To address this issue, the drilling systems and drill rigs were redesigned to allow the operator to stand back under the longwall canopy.

“He is away from the roof cavity, he’s not exposed to any fallen material, and he can carry out that polyurethane work in a much safer environment,” Bracken said.

“So it’s a good step forward to be able to do it like that.”

Bracken said the innovation came from the employees who had good ideas and could see how they could be applied practically to improve safety and efficiency at the mine.

“The guys at the site recognised there is some risk involved with putting people in areas where you’ve got some broken roof material. By way of risk assessment, and working with a couple of drill rig manufacturers, and picking one that had a system that could be modified, they changed the way it operates,” he told ILN.

“It’s just the application of our guys in being innovative and coming up with a better system and way of doing it.”

Angus Place and Newstan colliery’s bin cleaning system was showcased in the Centennial internal conference in October.

“All of our sites enter in this innovations conference and put forward something from each site. Newstan colliery put forward a bin cleaning system which won the company’s internal innovations award.

“Our sites work on it all year, they look at innovations, work out what they can do, and then present it internally. All sites are then encouraged to submit into the Minerals Council awards.”

Bracken says the company has a culture of safety awareness and innovation that starts at the managing director and goes through to all of its operations.

“We require every site to get involved. It’s all about how we want to build our safety culture and our innovation within our workforce,” he said.

“We recognise that our guys have got a lot of clever ideas so we create a way of getting those ideas out there, get them into place, we share that information with other sites, and it helps solves our problems across the whole group and this is just one way of doing that.

“It’s all about building our focus and awareness and improving safety.”