United Kingdom

I returning to the Midland for a visit to the UK Coal Authority and Alkane Energy. The Coal Authority issues the leases and licences for coal operations around the country and houses all the coal mining records and plans in a purpose built facility. I am totally amazed at the size of their archive and the way in which it is managed. The entire collection of 120000 plans has been scanned using a variety of scanners to cope with the variation of plan sizes. These images can be accessed by computer using a search facility that looks at the metadata attributed to each image. Whole plans or parts of plans can then be printed at any required scale. A brilliant system! They have also digitised the key information from all the plans for their GIS/oracle database and update it every two months with operational mine information. No electronic submission of data and all record tracing plans are hand drawn still. The GIS/oracle system is extremely well set up and allows for automated generation of reports on properties affected by undermining.

more to follow...

From Sheffield I drove south to Cornwall for the Remote Sensing and Photogrametry Society annual conference at the University of Exeter (cornwall campus) which is also now home to the famous Camborne School of Mines.

more to follow...

After leaving London, I travelled up to Sheffield by train, where I would base myself for a couple of days while I visited a couple of nearby Mines. Not a bad city, famous for its stainless steel and the movie the Full Monty.
Transport within the city is quite good, with trams and buses running regularly, but becuase I'm travelling out of town I hired a car to get around. First point of call was the National Coal Mining Museum, a discontinued coal mine now used to show visitors how the industry has developed and changed over the last couple of hundred years. The museum includes an underground tour of Caphouse colliery to a seam discontinued in 1913, 140m below the surface.

Arrived in London after the long haul from Australia and found the shoe box that I would call home for the next few days in Notting Hill. Nice, but not very big. No cat swinging here.
Did the obligitory tourist thing and wandered around to see the changing of the guard and took in the British Museum and Museum of Natural History. Easily a day each at each of the museums but I took the abridged tour. their collections are so vast.
On to business and the pre arranged visit to Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform - Oil and Gas section, to discuss management of petroleum rights for methane gas extraction at operational and abondoned mines. Interestingly the rights to exploit mineral resources are not managed by a single department in the UK, with coal being dealt with seperately to oil and gas, while other minerals are apparently privately owned. Health and Safety within the mines is seperate again.

Licences for methane are relatively simple, but worthless without development consent from the local councils or the agreement of the Coal Authority (I'll find out more about that next week).