This project is also an opportunity to reactivate the plant, which is going through difficult times. By 2020, the city-forming company had run up huge debts, after which it filed for bankruptcy. A competitive production was opened in Yurmash and its premises were leased to a subsidiary. In May 2022, the plant resumed its work. Under the most difficult economic conditions, machine builders carried out modernization and began to fulfill orders from large mining companies.
“Now that the borders are closed, the coal miners have turned in our direction,” says Victoria Miroshnichenko, director of the Yurmash production company. – They are interested in repairing hydraulic power systems for mining equipment (jacks, hydraulic cylinders, hydraulic struts of various manufacturers, including foreign ones) and are actively requesting repairs. Now we can provide services from any address, for any request. So even though the power hydraulics shop is busy, we’re still recruiting people, mostly those who worked at the plant before. And our mechanical assembly shop produces motorized roof support sections for mines. In February, a batch of finished products (five sections for reassembling the long fronts) was shipped to the customer and similar sections were brought in for repair. We verify the quality of the finished products in a test bench, the only one of its kind in the whole country. And we are waiting for new orders, since coal companies, as their leaders said, are implementing a number of large projects. We are very hopeful that all projects will be successful, and this will save our plant.
The start of production of shearing machines in Kuzbass will further strengthen the position of Yurmash. Taking into account that in 2017 the plant, commissioned by one of the mines, already manufactured the K750Yu combine, which passed preliminary tests and received the go-ahead from the miners. It remained only to eliminate certain shortcomings. And now it’s easier not to start everything from scratch, but to modify the same car, taking into account new requirements.
The production and testing of an industrial design, according to Victoria Miroshnichenko, will take two and a half years and a lot of money. The Yurga machine builders do not have the latter, that is, there is high hope that an interested investor will appear. And to be more precise, the consumer of new technology. This, by the way, is one of the main conditions for federal financing of the project.
The director of the Scientific and Educational Center “Kuzbass” Irina Ganieva recalled: for a long time, domestic coal companies bought abroad not only equipment, but also ready-made technologies. However, times are changing and, in the last three or four years, interest in national developments has been increasing. The complex scientific and technical program of the full cycle of innovation “Clean Coal – Green Kuzbass” is called upon to focus the attention of representatives of the coal industry on them. The development of coal engineering is one of its priorities.
According to Irina Ganieva, the program will end in 2026 with the introduction into production of more than thirty innovative developments. The effect of its application in the first year is expected to exceed four billion rubles.
Direct speech
Andrey Panov, Kuzbass Deputy Governor for the Fuel and Power, Transport and Ecology Complex:
– Currently, shears are not produced in Russia at all. In connection with the sanctions, the world’s leading manufacturers stopped supplying their products to Russian companies, some of which immediately relocated to China. But this is a temporary solution: substituting one import for another is ineffective in the future. Chinese manufacturers have many commercial offers with finished products, but we need domestic equipment. It is clear that tomorrow we will not receive it, but it is better to set up our own production than to follow the simple path of changing one import supplier for another.
