OREANDA-NEWS. Yancoal Australia said that up to 225 of its employees face redundancies at its 2mn t/yr Abel and Austar underground thermal coal mines in New South Wales (NSW) in response to lower coal prices.

The redundancies follows Yancoal, which is owned by China's state-controlled Yanzhou Coal, cutting 48 jobs at the Abel mine last September. Austar has been under review since two miners died at the mine in April 2014.

Yancoal has looked at options to retain or redeploy as many miners as possible since the Austar incident. "Unfortunately, the continued downturn in the global coal market has made the mine's current situation unsustainable," Yancoal said.

The Austar mine will continue to operate with 185 employees, after 55 employees or 23pc of the workforce will be laid off in the current round of redundancies, Yancoal said.

The Abel mine will no longer produce coal on the weekends as part of a restructuring to a five-day a week operation with a total of 108 employees, which means 60pc of the workforce will be laid off.

Yancoal Australia produced 20mn t in 2014, down by 1.1mn t from 2013.