Contractor Mastermyne expects the restarted Cook Colliery near Blackwater to support a workforce of 180, with the bulk of the underground jobs up for grabs towards the end of the year.

Recruitment is also ramping up for Sojitz Blue’s Crinum underground operation, including a program to provide opportunities for ‘clean skins’.

And another major opportunity is on the horizon, with Bengal Coal’s Dysart East project.

Mastermyne’s leading role in bringing the mothballed Cook and Crinum coal mines back into operation comes off the back of a deliberate corporate strategy set in motion about five years ago.

Chief executive officer Tony Caruso said the group had identified a transition in the market and set itself up to fill a need as assets passed out of the hands of global majors to smaller entities.

QCoal Group subsidiary Constellation Mining has engaged Mastermyne Group to resurrect operations at Cook Colliery, which was placed in care and maintenance when Bounty Mining went into voluntary administration late in 2019.

The first phase of the restart begins immediately, with a hand-selected team undertaking engineering and technical work.

“Within a few months, we’ll then start recruiting a small workforce to start getting the site ready for operations and then, from completion of the backend of phase one, we’ll recruit the full workforce to start stage two,” Mr Caruso said.

He expected to be recruiting for the underground workforce and a range of technical roles in the last quarter of the year.

Mr Caruso said Mastermyne and QCoal were very conscious of Cook’s checkered history, with problems including roof falls.

He stressed that they were taking a very low-risk approach using a bord and pillar method and focusing on new areas of the mine.

“We are not going into the old areas where they have had problems previously,” he said.

“The approach with QCoal, and they’ve been fantastic to work with, is they’ve been very considered in their approach. We’re not trying to create expectations that are going to lead to poor decisions at the mine.

“We’re taking the time to get the right equipment together and really assessing the area, let’s say going into areas that we know are very low risk from a mining point of view.”

In May it was announced that Sojitz Blue’s Crinum underground mine would start producing coal by the end of the year, with a $600 million mining services awarded to Mastermyne Group.

The bord and pillar mining operation is expected to employ 180 full-time personnel in full production.

Mr Caruso said work there was progressing well.

“We’ve now opened up the drifts, so we’ve established a primary ventilation circuit and we’re back in the drifts doing work,” he said.

“We’re preparing the drifts, removing a lot of old, redundant infrastructure and getting ready to install all the new infrastructure.

“That’ll happen over the next couple of months. We’ll start to see equipment arriving onsite, so initially ventilation systems and conveyor equipment.”

Recruiting has started for that operation, including a ‘clean skin’ assessment day held in Emerald last week to provide opportunities for people without experience to join the team.

“The recruiting of the experienced people is also underway. Numbers are starting to increase there now, and they’ll progressively increase between now and the end of the year,” Mr Caruso said.

Mastermyne has been engaged through an Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) process to act as mining contractor for Bengal Coal’s proposed Dysart East underground coal mine, 7km east of Dysart.

Bengal Coal is still working through approvals and financing, but the anticipated timeline would see project construction kick off in early 2023.

Mr Caruso said that project was expected to employ around 300 to 350 people through construction and early production, before settling to a full-time workforce of about 200-220 people.