Project of Extraction of Oil Shales in Aleksinac to be Resurrected – What About Coal?

The plan of the public enterprise PEU Resavica for next year envisages a project of detailed geological explorations within which the moving of the flow of the river Moravica near Aleksinac and the potential extraction of oil shales are planned, Branko Djukic, the executive director for technical affairs at this public company, told eKapija.

– The plan is for an excavation to be done in a location near the river Moravica within the project of detailed geological explorations. The bed of the Moravica should be moved there in the length of 650 meters, so that a quantity of coal could be encompassed through surface exploitation, and a part of oil shales could be excavated in the process – Djukic said for our portal.

According to him, this is part of the plan of Resavica for 2022, which has passed the supervisory board of the company and which will be sent to the government to be adopted.

Let us remind that the plan of extracting oil shales in the location near Aleksinac is around fifteen years old. In 2012, the state even sought a consultant for that project and announced a search for a strategic partner for that job, which those who are familiar with the matter claim is an expensive and extremely dirty technology.

At the time, it was reported that oil shale reserves in Aleksinac met the oil needs of Serbia for the next 50 years and that there might even be enough for exports.

The competent ministry, led by the then minister Oliver Dulic, also announced the moving of the Moravica bed, in the length of 1,300 meters. However, it all remained at the level of plans, because of the subsequent political changes.

Reserves of Aleksinac brown coal waiting for state’s signal

When asked whether, in the midst of the electrical energy crisis in Serbia, the launching of underground exploitation of brown coal from the Aleksinac mines, which the experts claim is of much higher quality than lignite and of higher energy value, is being considered, Djukic says that Resavica’s plan for next year does not envisage the initiation of mining activities within the Aleksinac mines with underground exploitation.

– After the 1989 accident, the excavation was put ad acta. We have considerable quantities of coal at the Dubrava site in Aleksinac and we could excavate that, but I can’t say when. It requires a strategy, a study, it requires documentation, and that can only happen if a decision is made on the state level for the coal to be excavated from this site. However, in my opinion, a long time will pass before this happens – Djukic says for eKapija.

When it comes to the excavation of coal from the surface, at the Aleksinac mine, in 2019, for the first time after 30 years, a test excavation of 3,000 tons of coal was done, but that’s as far as it went.

B. Petrovic

JP PEU Resavica

Ministarstvo rudarstva i energetike Republike Srbije

PE PEU Resavica

Ministry of Mining and Energy

Aleksinac mines

Moravica river

Branko Đukić

Nemanja Denić

brown coal

oil shales

surface exploitation

underground exploitation

test production

geological explorations