Speaker Rtn Mrs Eileen Thomas - The coal fields of Pakistan

Wed, Jan 28th 2015 at 12:00 am - 2:00 am

Mrs Eileen Thomas who is John Watson's sister and a member of the Rotary Club of Ewell will speak about "The coal fields of Pakistan". -------------- Speaker Finder Tony Gill, Visitors Host Grace and Banners Gerald Sanderson, Cash Desk Tony Ashton


Mrs Eileen Thomas, was guest Speaker and talked about "The coal fields of Pakistan" and, about conditions in general out there.

Eileen is a member of the Rotary Club of Ewell based in Banstead Surrey and is John Watson's sister and is the lady who very kindly found us the channel for finally sending the funds we raised for building houses for some of the people affected by the flooding in Pakistan. She is a qualified architect and planner and has mainly worked in the public sector but more recently was  a director of Mott McDonald.

After retiring from Mott McDonald she was asked by them to a consultancy project advising the Sindh Province in Pakistan on how best mine the coal deposits that were found in 1991 in the district of Tharparkar. Currently most of Pakistan's energy comes from imported oil and there have recently been riots over the availability of electricity so the government is very keen to utilise energy sources within the country.

Before going to Pakistan Eileen had to go on a "Hostile Environment" course that covered such diverse things as First Aid and how to ram another car. The course mainly covers "threat risk and mitigation".

The district of Tharparkar is about the same size as Northern Ireland.The main area is a dessert - but the most populated dessert in the world with one million people currently living there with this expected to increase to three million because of the rapid growth in birth rates.

The population get their water from deep aquifers that are replenished by the annual monsoons. Unfortunately the geology of the area is such that these aquifers are above the coal layer. Also the other strata above the coal is very soft so the coal cannot be extracted by deep pit mining. Which means it is only accessable by open cast mining - but these mines need to be about 1.5 mile deep. It takes 5 year to dig down to the coal layer and completely destroys the aquifers.

Eileen's consultancy project was to review ways of bringing road, rail and water into the area from outside. She was also looking at how best to re-settle villagers located in the areas of the proposed mines which involved trying to decide which areas were likely to be polluted not just by the mine but also by wind borne acidic rains and gases.

The coal in the Thar coal fields is very poor quality lignite so in order to use it efficiently it needs to be consumed in pit head power stations. One idea being looked at is underground coal gasification. In this method the coal is burnt underground to produce gas which can then be transmitted to other areas of Pakistan. It is claimed that this reduces greenhouse gas emissions as the CO2 is kept underground.

 

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