Last week Peabody Energy unveiled plans to shed 20-25% of the workforce which was expected to potentially cost more than 100 jobs.

However, Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union local district vice-president Bob Timbs told International Coal News that about 46 CFMEU members were earmarked for redundancy from the consultation work so far.

Timbs said they were in early stages of looking at voluntary redundancies and once those acceptances are in the union will be in a better position to see how many forced redundancies there could be.

At this stage he is expecting the total job losses to be around 93.

The job losses come as the mine is expected to step down from a seven-day to a five-day production schedule this month.

They also follow recent 15% quarter-on-quarter fall in the premium coking coal benchmark with Japanese steelmakers for the September quarter.

The previous seven-day weekly underground work roster included three shifts of 10 hours each for four days and two shifts of 12 hours each for the other three days.