Brown coal open-pit mining Inden

The Inden open-pit mine is a lignite open pit of RWE Power AG. It is located in the Rhineland lignite mining district near Inden, between Eschweiler and Jülich. The annual production amounts to 22 million tons of lignite and is exclusively used to supply the Weisweiler power plant. The coal seams are up to 45 meters thick. The mining is carried out using bucket-wheel excavators, and the backfilling before recultivation is done with tailings. This operation employs 850 people. It is expected that the open pit will be exhausted by 2030.
The Inden opencast mine has lignite reserves of currently 440 million tons that can still be mined. The lignite was formed from extensive forests and bogs that developed in the Lower Rhine Bay 30 to 5 million years ago. The geology of the Lower Rhine Bay is characterized by prolonged subsidence movements over the last 30 million years, which have led to the deposition of a sediment package up to 1,300 meters thick by the North Sea and by many rivers in this region.
The large-scale mining made it necessary for some villages to be completely abandoned and the residents to be resettled. There was partly vehement opposition from the population against this, however, the resettlement is considered unavoidable by the open-pit mine operators, as the coal extraction from the open pit is legally seen to serve the public good.

geolein