Gippsland’s little bricks

From 1873 we knew there were brown coal deposits in Gippsland. We’d known there was black coal, in places, since 1823.

We had the problem that the black coal was in small deposits in many places. Gippsland black coal was mined mainly in the Narracan Valley, around Korumburra and at Wonthaggi. It was of good quality but not in large enough quantities. We had to import coal for our railways and our industries.

Brown coal, of which we have one of the world’s greatest deposits, is wetter and does not burn as hotly. It took some time to get it right, but the answer was the briquette, the ‘little brick’.

Th Great Morwell Coal Mining Company was about the only coal company to survive the turbulent times of the late 1880s and 1890s. At a Royal Commission into the industry and Victoria’s supply problem, one J.W. Corbett spoke about briquettes and by 1893 the Otis Elevator people had set up a plant near the Great Morwell open cut to make briquettes but this was burned in an 1895 bushfire.

I don’t know the quality of those first briquettes but the science was not really up to the challenge for many years to come. Nonetheless, the Otis plant had produced 4000 tons of reasonably good briquettes.

The Yallourn power station, begun in 1921, was sending electricity to Melbourne from 1924. The State Electricity Commission spent half a million pounds on a briquetting plant designed to produce 100,000 tons of briquettes a year,

The real purpose of briquetting the coal was to remove the excess moisture and thus lower the transport costs. Less weight and greater heating made it possible to send brown coal down to do the things for which we’d been dependent on black coal, often from Cessnock.

The coal was crushed so that the largest pieces were less than half a centimetre thick, dried until it had only about 15 per cent of the original moisture, cooled and then pressed into briquettes. There were three sizes made – I only knew of two – being household briquettes, small industrial briquettes and large industrial briquettes.

I might just mention that those long coal trains were travelling over fairly lightly-laid track and so they swerved and swayed their way toward the Big Smoke. That mean briquettes fell off the trucks and that, in turn meant that when we walked up the railway from the Longwarry farm to Grandma’s Drouin house, we’d collect briquettes on the way home, for the copper.

There were a couple of community leaders in Narre Warren who’d visit any coal trucks left on the old sidings there, armed with rakes and bags. Say no more.

In the years of the Second World War the demand for power was significantly greater as industry went to full capacity. The situation became critical in 1944 when a fire put much of the Yallourn equipment out of action. Fires have been a recurring problem for the valley’s coal industry. Most coal was saved for electricity generation following this fire and households could only use briquettes for heating water.

In 1949 the supply of black coal from NSW was cut. Briquettes were more or less rationed, and the State Electricity Commission could not get enough supply to maintain the necessary generation of electric power. Something significant had to be done, and it was.

The Morwell power station was a vastly larger and more complex operation – and the first electricity was sent on down the line at the end of 1958, thirty four years later.

It took 10 years to build the Morwell Power Station and the associated briquetting plant. Through the 1950s that construction provided hundreds of jobs, important in what still a post-war economy in many ways, despite the ‘wool boom’ of the early 50s.The government of the day was rebuilding the economy and encouraging new industrial ventures. That mean a great need for power and the La Trobe Valley was the obvious source. We had some black coal in Victoria but not in great quantities.

At this stage Morwell was leading the world with its technology, from the long-distance transport of electricity by overhead lines pioneered by the SEC at Yallourn, to the Lurgi gas plant and a world-class briquetting plant, As always, there was a problem that should have been foreseen, but was not.

The brown coal from the Morwell open cut was not suitable for making briquettes. After all that planning and building that was a significant hitch. No problem. We just built a standalone railway system from Yallourn over the highway and into the Morwell plant and brought the better-quality Yallourn coal over to Morwell. It is worth noting that La Trobe Valley brown coal is ‘young coal’, similar to German coal, rather than Canadian coal, which is generally more ‘mature’.

The Lurgi gas plant was built for Victoria’s new Gas and Fuel Corporation, created in1950. The plant was able to produce a third of Victoria’s gas. That was achieved in 1960. The processes for the “high pressure brown coal gasification plant” were of German origin, as was most of the technology used in the Valley. The significance of that to a story on briquettes is that the plant used 131,191 tonnes of briquettes to make that gas. That is a big pile of briquettes and I wonder whether this was where the ‘large industrial” briquettes were used.

The story of the Gas and Fuel Corporation is something we will look at another time. In some ways it was a brilliant success and in some ways it was not, but it was certainly a significant part of Gippsland’s past.

Briquette production at Morwell began in December of 1959 and that was when it was discovered that the Morwell coal was not as good as that at Yallourn, so we got a new self-contained railway system to bring Yallourn coal to Morwell. Morwell became the heart of power generation and briquetting in the Latrobe Valley.

By 1979 the Morwell complex was producing all Victoria’s briquettes, about a million tonnes a year, and coal production was a staggering thirteen million tonnes annually,

The dreaded scourge of privatisation hit the briquetting plant in 1993 when the SECV sold it to Energy Brix Australia. Natural gas supplies made briquetting less profitable and the 2003 fires meant the end of Morwell briquetting was approaching. Briquetting there was closed down and in 2014 the power-generation part of the plant was also closed.

It is a little hard to grasp the fact that something so important to us all through the 1950s and 1960s has now effectively disappeared from Gippsland.