Berbeşti Coal Mine is an open-pit mining

Open-pit mining

Open-pit mining or opencast mining refers to a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth by their removal from an open pit or borrow....

 exploitation, one of the largest in Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

 located in Berbeşti

Berbesti

Berbeşti is a town located in Vâlcea County, Romania, about 78 km south-west from Râmnicu Vâlcea. It was granted town status by law in October 2003...

, Vâlcea County

Vâlcea County

Vâlcea is a county of Romania, in the historical regions of Oltenia and Muntenia...

. The legal entity managing the Berbeşti mine is the National Company of Lignite Oltenia

National Company of Lignite Oltenia

National Company of Lignite Oltenia Târgu-Jiu was set up as a commercial society by the Government of Romania in 1997. The main headquarters of the company is placed in Târgu-Jiu, Gorj County....

 which was set up in 1997.

The exploitation has four open pits Seciuri, Olteţ, Berbeşti-Vest, Panga that produced 2.5 million tonnes of lignite

Lignite

Lignite, often referred to as brown coal, or Rosebud coal by Northern Pacific Railroad,is a soft brown fuel with characteristics that put it somewhere between coal and peat...

 in 2008. The mine has around 1,800 workers and is endowed with 13 bucket-wheel excavator

Bucket-wheel excavator

Bucket-wheel excavators are heavy equipment used in surface mining and mechanical engineering/civil engineering. The primary function of BWEs is to act as a continuous digging machine in large-scale open pit mining operations...

s, seven spreaders

Spreader (railroad)

A spreader is a type of maintenance equipment designed to spread or shape ballast profiles. The spreader spreads gravel along the railroad ties...

, one mixed machine

Machine

A machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work...

and five deposits spreader. The total proven recoverable reserves of the mine amount to 67 million tonnes of lignite.