Coal Editing and Proofreading Services

Every coal operation ends. The question is whether it ends according to a plan written when there was money to fund it, or according to whatever is affordable in the year the last shipment leaves. The closure plan is drafted decades in advance by people who will not be there, reviewed occasionally, and then becomes — very suddenly — the most important document the company owns.

We edit what coal operators and their advisers produce — mine closure and rehabilitation plans, closure cost estimates and provisioning documentation, progressive rehabilitation reporting, water management and long-term treatment documentation, subsidence and land stability documentation, workforce transition and community plans, regulatory submissions and licence variation applications, environmental monitoring and compliance reporting, asset retirement obligation disclosures, community consultation material, post-closure monitoring and relinquishment documentation, and stakeholder communications about the end of operations. Our editors work on the plan that has to survive the company that wrote it.

The closure plan and its cost estimate is where a mine's end is either provided for or deferred onto someone else, and the failure is a plan written to satisfy a condition rather than to be executed. We work through these so each closure domain is described with what it will physically be afterwards — the pit, the spoil, the tailings, the roads, the workshop slab — rather than as a commitment to rehabilitate; so the cost estimate is built from those descriptions with quantities, unit rates and their date, since a lump sum carried forward for eleven years is not an estimate; so the long-tail items are named and separately provided for, because water treatment that must continue for forty years is the item that turns an affordable closure into an unaffordable one and it is routinely folded into a contingency line; so the assumptions about who does the work are stated, given that a plan assuming the operator's own fleet is worthless once the fleet is sold; so the completion criteria are written as measurable conditions agreed with the regulator rather than as objectives; and so what has already been rehabilitated progressively is evidenced rather than claimed. Plans written this way are fundable, which is the only test that matters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including cost estimates, plans and regulatory correspondence. We are editors rather than mining, environmental or financial advisers, and we offer no view on closure liabilities, costs or compliance. What we can do is make the plan describe work somebody could actually carry out.