Rovinari 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, 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 Rovinari

Rovinari

Rovinari is a town in Gorj County, southern Romania with a population of 12,603 . It is a mining city, nearby to surface and underground mines. A big thermo-electrical power plant functions close to the town....

, Gorj County

Gorj County

Gorj is a county of Romania, in Oltenia, with its capital city at Târgu Jiu.- Demographics :In 2002, it had a population of 387,308 and its population density was 69/km².* Romanians – over 98%* Rromas, others.- Geography :...

. The legal entity managing the Rovinari 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 Tismana I, Tismana II, Gârla - Rovinari Est and Pinoasa that produced 8 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 3,000 workers and is endowed with 23 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, 14 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...

, three mixed machines

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 one deposits spreader. The total proven recoverable reserves of the mine amount to 180 million tonnes of lignite.