Abstract

Geomaps for Coal mining
Track: Mining and Geosciences
Authors: Luis Montes

Cerrejón is Colombia's largest mining operation and one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines. The company excavates pits a Paleocene´s Coal-bearing sedimentary sequence composed by over 175 seams in an overall southeast-dipping monocline crossed by thrust and strike-slip faults oblique to its strike.
A large GIS geodatabase of seam traces, structural and stratigraphic data, taken with handheld GPS's, and Coal-quality information, has been combined with survey, exploration boreholes and short planning designs to create geological maps of monthly mining advances. These maps use queries, label expressions, different simbologies and table joins to show coal quality data, thicknesses and geological structures affecting coal seams.
ArcGIS has allowed to manage large amount of information and create useful maps to take accurate field decisions. In a future, this geodatabase could support the creation of a full-3D geological model developed in ArcGIS.