In North Rhine-Westphalia, western Germany, the largest machine that man has put on earth operates. Forget about huge ships, aircraft carrier either oil platforms: It’s an excavator. It is called Bagger 293, and its very existence is the moving memory of what industrial engineering is capable of when it is demanded without limits.
What is it, exactly? The Bagger 293, also known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a bucket wheel excavator (those that have a giant toothed disc at one end) designed for open pit mining. It was built by the German company TAKRAF, a subsidiary of the MAN group, between 1990 and 1995 in Leipzig. His goal from day one was only one: extract lignitethe so-called brown coal, in the Hambach mine, one of the largest mining operations in Europe. Today it remains operational, owned by RWE Power AG, Germany’s second largest energy producer.
Numbers. It is 96 meters high, equivalent to a building of more than 30 floorsand 225 meters long, which is more than two football fields placed in a row. It weighs 14,200 tons. The Guinness Book of Records officially recognizes it as the largest and heaviest land vehicle in the world. Shares title with its predecessor, the Bagger 288although the 293 surpasses it in size and capacity.
It also cannot be transported. And moving it about 120 kilometers requires more than three weeks of continuous work, with progress of just 5 or 6 kilometers a day.
How it works istea monster. The heart of the machine is a 21.3 meter diameter rotating wheel armed with 18 buckets, large steel buckets, each capable of loading up to 15 cubic meters of material per cycle. That wheel spins non-stop, tearing off layers of earth and rock to reveal the veins of lignite, which are then transported by giant belts to the electricity generation plants.
Under normal conditions, the Bagger 293 can move up to 240,000 tons of material in a single day. Furthermore, it is estimated that what it does in one day is equivalent to the manual work of about 40,000 miners. All this with only five operators on board, controlling the system from a central cockpit.
electric appetite. To start such a structure, a direct external energy source of 16.56 megawatts is needed (about more than 22,500 HP if we do the conversion). This would be approximately equivalent to the electricity needed to supply a city of about 20,000 inhabitants.
On the other hand, it should be noted that the Bagger 293 does not have its own conventional engine, it is permanently connected to the industrial electrical network. Its 12 steel tracks, each 3.8 meters wide, distribute the immense weight over the ground in a controlled manner so that the ground does not give way under it.
Leaf where you work. The excavator works in the Hambach mine, the largest open-pit mine in Germany, with an approved area of up to 8,500 hectares and a depth that reaches 500 meters below ground level. According to Bloombergthe mine produces around 40 million tonnes of lignite per year, enough to power around 8 million homes. But the mine is not without controversy. Brown coal is the most polluting fossil fuel per unit of energy produced, and the exploitation of Hambach 90% of the historic Hambach Forest has been wiped outan ecosystem more than 12,000 years old.
As of 2012, environmental activists They occupied the remaining trees for years in a protest that ended up becoming a symbol of the climate debate in Germany. In 2018, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the mine’s expansion. Greta Thunberg herself visited the place in 2019stating that he found it “devastating” to see places like the Hambach mine. In January 2020, the German government agreed to preserve the remaining forest, and in August of that same year Germany committed to its definitive exit from coal by 2038.
According to Global Energy Monitormining at the Hambach mine will cease in 2029, and the plan is to transform the territory into a reclaimed landscape that will include a large artificial lake.
Images | Andreas Lippold (Wikimedia Commons), Stefan Fussan (Wikimedia Commons), Steve Rowell
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