Following the pipes to make sense of the Belchatów coal power plant in Poland
Belchatow coal power plant. Photo by konrad doboszg.
When glancing at satellite imagery in search of forests in Europe, my mind caught various beige patches that looked unnatural. Zooming in quickly revealed them to be open pit coal mines. By chance, I happened to look at the one in Belchatow, Southern Poland. I had never heard of it before, but the associated coal power station turns out to be Europe’s largest coal power station and apparently the most toxic one too, as outlined by Wikipedia.
Despite the above, I was fascinated by the massive industrial complex and simply figuring out what all is there.
Today, we’ll go through my flow of identifying the key functions of this power plant, armed with only satellite imagery and my basic understanding of how various power plants work.
The big picture
Below is an image of the total Belchatow complex. It’s big, spanning nearly 30 kilometres from the westernmost spoil heap to the eastern one. The individual pits are 7.5km wide. For a man-made hole, that takes serious shoveling.
Overview of the Belchatow complex with annotations of key analysis pieces. Pinch or click to zoom.
The image already reveals the key structures we’ll discuss, and the text below outlines the simple journey of following the natural flow from coal to the power plant to figure out what is what.
1. The pits
We see the pit with a dark centre and lighter-shade terraces around it (below). These are the lignite coal pits. One of the dirtiest forms of energy, but also one that explains so much of why areas rich in it benefited greatly during the early industrial boom.
One of the 7.5km wide Belchatow coal pits, with an excavator and conveyor belt connector highlighted.
The coal is not just lying on the surface, so soil has to be moved away to reach the purest lignite deposits. An elevation analysis (shown in paragraph 2) shows this pit is around 130m deep, and the other one almost 300m.
The image above reveals the monstrous machines called bucket wheel excavators over 100m long doing this process, and below is an image of them in action. At the same time, conveyor belts on the pit floor connect to the complex conveyor belt system on the north side, with a clear “exchange station” connecting to the main East-West line.
This part was simple: Get the coal, ship it out with a conveyor belt.
An example bucket excavator in Germany. For scale, the small white things under the machine are pickup trucks. Photo by Chris Munch.
2. The big mounds (Spoil heaps)
This I had to think for a moment. On both ends of the coal mine there are these circular structures, not too dissimilar to the open pits. I was thinking at first these are perhaps new pits in preparation stage. But on closer inspection, a few things stand out.
Areas marked in yellow dotted line show areas with neat rows of newly deposited material, indicating active piling. The circular rows of roads as well as the zig-zag road in the north are tell-tale signs of elevation difference.
First, there are clear areas where new soil is being deposited, with neatly organized piles creating a new terrace edge. Second and more revealingly, I did an experimental elevation profile mapping in Google Earth, which revealed these are actually massive piles and not flat. The elevation data puts both of these almost 200m higher than the surrounding elevation (see below). After this data, the zig-zag road pattern on the northern flank also becomes an obvious signs of elevation difference.
Elevation analysis with the rough DEM data highlighs both notable height of the mounds and depth of the pits.
In hindsight it is obvious, but it took me embarrassingly many minutes to conclude these are obviously just earth moved away from the massive coal pits.
I used Google to check the official name “spoil heap” for these as my “big pile” and “big mound” felt a bit off.
3. The conveyor belt
This is intuitive: Following any belt from the pit floor ultimately connects to the actual power plant. But it is like a highway of coal: There are 3 main West-East lines going to the powerplant, with various transfer stations making sure the coal moves without interruption from pit to burn.
I didn’t calculate it, but just judging by the distances and number of parallel lines suggests there’s easily over a 100km of conveyor belt here.
Below is the transfer station between the main lines and the final belt system going to the actual power station. We can see four piles of coal. They look small but each is 400m long, the size of an aircraft carrier. I assume these are an interim/backup storage to defend against possible maintenance downtimes anywhere upstream on the conveyor belt system and to act as a short-term supply-demand shock absorber.
Conveyor belt connection on the West-East line connecting to the pits, and the northern belt leading to the power plant. Interim / staging ground storage area clearly visible.
4. The power plant
This is where things get interesting. There are dozens of buildings interconnected by conveyor belts, pipes and other structures, and I have no idea about the role of most of them. But the big ticket items are easy to recognize. Most importantly, where the coal is headed is where it’s burnt – the boilers. This process creates steam, which is fed into turbines, which creates electricity. These are marked below.
Power plant with the most basic components highlighted for analysis.
Following the coal conveyor belts to the big building, we find the actual power plant. There are 12 identical boiler & turbine halls in a neat row, not too dissimilar to how cylinders in a car engine could be arranged. But instead of one crankshaft, the 12 boilers are each connected to its own turbine and generator in these halls. The raw coal is pulverized for burning next to these boilers. South of these are two tall chimneys for all of the boilers, with red high visibility markings.
North of the boilers are 6 large cooling towers that are often associated with nuclear power plants, each evidently supporting 2 boilers. This type of natural draft cooling tower is used for any power plant with high cooling needs. North of these cooling towers are barely visible 6 cut paths into the forest, that are electrical grid connections.
The area marked “newest unit” took a few minutes for me to figure out originally. But it clearly has a similar conveyor belt connection and a dedicated turbine housing. Further confidence came from Google Earth photogrammetry, which models the complex in excellent detail.
There are other critical features like water reservoirs, but we cannot see the underground piping so cannot distinguish the skeleton of this system. Many buildings are related to maintenance and sub-processes, and there are undoubtedly associated industrial manufacturers in the area.
The unknown building
There is one building marked “unknown”, below in a close-up. I could have marked all of the other buildings as unknown, but this one seems the most important due to its size (it’s 500m long) and that it’s widely connected by pipes to the power plant structures, seen as the yellow lines in the image below.
A closer look at the unknown building reveal a complex array of connectors leading back towards the turbine housing and chimneys..
I had two theories: First, it’s input-related. Something fed to the burning process to make the process more efficient or cleaner or enabling alternative fuel sources like biomass. But I don’t think this is it: First, the large building seems more like it processes an output, rather than acts as an input. On the building’s west end, there are two truck ramps with something that looks like drop-in loaders, rather than offloading terminals.
Second theory is about post-processing. I know heavy industry chimneys in EU must be fitted with filters that scrub environmentally harmful emissions as much as possible. I don’t know how this process works and orbital imagery is of no help here. My curiosity did take me too Google and AI, both of which indicated it might indeed be this, more specifically processing for calcium sulfate created as a byproduct of the exhaust gas filtration.
5. Ash pond
Zooming out again. What isleft to explain of the big ticket items are two dirty looking pits, which on closer inspection have stream-like structures on them. Surrounding these two pools is a robust piping network, with dozens of outflow pipes capable of pumping water to the pools. Following the pipes back leads directly back near the turbines. The dark colour hints at the presence of ash, though Google’s algorithm makes the contrast more dramatic than what reality is.
I conclude these pools are where industrial wastewater is pumped. Must be one unhealthy looking pool.
Ash pond with a highlighted part showing the outflow pipes. Similar pipes surround the entire perimeter.
A brief look at the emissions
Looking at Windy’s excellent air quality layers, we can see how Nitrogen Dioxide, Sulphur Dioxide and Particulate matter emissions coincide with the power plant – these are the three key pollutants from coal power plants.
We shall not find ourself a longer time series, but look at one point in time below to get a sense of the situation.
Windy illustration of key emissions data in early June 2026 do reveal elevated emissions in the area, especially with suplhur dioxide.
The images do reveal something. Belchatow is clearly a hot spot of Nitrogen dioxide, and has higher concentrations than e.g. Warsaw city centre, but notably lower than for instance major shipping lanes or cities alongside them. Sulphur Dioxide is clearly elevated, but seemingly the entire Southwest Poland is a major emitter, indicating presence of more coal power plants, heavy industry and traffic. When it comes to particulate matter, the needle is elevated, but not dramatic.
Conclusion: Why it matters
This was a classic Orbital Vantage case of “hey what’s this”, with a closer look helping us piece together a coherent picture. In other words, an enjoyable puzzle piecing exercise. Though staying on high-level for ease.
Now armed with the knowledge of how a massive coal power plant looks like, we could easily repeat this process for smaller or modern variations, or power plants with different fuels like biomass, gas, oil and nuclear. They all have unique, identifiable structures.
See you,
Orbital Vantage
