07 September 2026
Breakthrough underground: Franz Haniel’s bold path into modern Ruhr coal mining
Ruhrort: Haniel’s gateway to coal
Before the Ruhr area became a coal and steel region, Ruhrort – today a district of Duisburg – was a place of transshipment, and for the Haniels already an important starting point for their trading business. The small harbor at the mouth of the Ruhr, built in 1716, connected the coalfields of the County of Mark with the Rhine. The coal that was stored and resold in Ruhrort came from what was still comparatively simple mining. It was extracted where the seams came close to the surface at the southern edge of the coalfield: at first by simple surface digging, later by means of adits and drainage adits (Erbstollen), which at the same time carried off the mine water. This was predominantly lean coal – well suited as a fuel, but not yet the decisive quality for coking and thus for iron production. It traveled to the mouth of the Ruhr on “Nachen” – flat barges used for river transport – where it was stored, reloaded and sold on towards Kleve, Moers, Holland or the Upper Rhine. In a region where fuel was scarce, this trade quickly became an economic factor.
With the Ruhr made navigable between 1774 and 1780, Ruhrort gained further importance. Locks turned the river into the most important coal waterway of its time. Transshipment grew and new storage yards were created. When the Ruhrort Coal Regulation opened up trade in 1787, merchants were able to source coal more directly from the collieries. For entrepreneurs in Ruhrort this was an opportunity. From 1796 onward, Aletta Haniel sought a coal depot of her own. A few years later, after repeated applications, Franz Haniel was finally granted one on a permanent basis.
From Noot to Haniel – early roots in mining
The Haniels’ connection with mining goes back further than the well-known names Zollverein and Rheinpreußen would suggest. One early piece of evidence leads to the Noot family, from which Aletta Haniel came: In 1772 her mother, the widow Catharina Noot, née Erckenswick, joined forces with her six children and the entrepreneur Johann Wilhelm Müser. Together they acquired shares in the Wilhelmsbank colliery near Bochum. The purchase agreement also refers to an even earlier Noot shareholding in the “Hauptschlüsseler Erbstollen” drainage adit. Franz Haniel’s marriage to Friederike Huyssen added a further mining connection: Her father Arnold Huyssen was associated with Sälzer & Neuack, Essen’s first deep mine, where steam engines and pumps were already playing a role in 1809 and, from 1816, the coking of hard coal as well.
How ironworks changed the value of coal
In Ruhrort, the route to coal initially ran through trade: The warehouse that Jan Willem Noot had built in 1756 stood for storage, transshipment and resale. That changed as iron production, mechanical engineering and transport came to work ever more closely together.
Through the forwarding of ironworks products, Aletta Haniel came into contact early on with the ironworks in what is today the Oberhausen area. Franz and Gerhard Haniel built on this: In 1805 they acquired stakes in St. Antony and Neu-Essen, and later, with Gute Hoffnung, the ironworks partnership Jacobi, Haniel & Huyssen was formed. Coal was thus no longer merely a commodity to be moved and sold. It increasingly became a prerequisite for iron production – and therefore a key to industrial value creation.
Coal, coke and iron: Franz Haniel’s industrial vision
Franz Haniel recognized early on that the future would not be decided by trade alone. From 1803 he took shares in collieries in the Ruhr valley, among them the Schiffsruder colliery in Bochum-Stiepel. From 1808 he recorded ownership structures, transport situations and costs in his notebook. He approached mining in a way that was both sober and strategic: Coal was to strengthen trade and shipping, but above all to secure supplies for the ironworks. Franz Haniel pursued the goal of converting the ironworks step by step from increasingly scarce charcoal to coke made from hard coal. Technically this remained difficult for a long time, because not every kind of Ruhr coal was suitable for blast furnaces. The decisive type was fat coal, which thanks to its caking properties could be processed into load-bearing coke. That quality was to be found precisely where extraction was hardest: further north, at greater depths.
This gave colliery ownership an added significance. Anyone with coal of their own could produce more independently, calculate more reliably and secure growth over the long term. But anyone with access to the right quality of coal could prepare the next industrial step: coke for blast furnaces, iron for machines and rails, transport routes to larger markets. Franz Haniel experimented for years with the coking of Ruhr coal, introduced a closed coke oven on the Ruhr in 1821 and expanded coke production further. Yet as long as the fat coal that was particularly suitable for blast-furnace coke lay beneath the northern marl cover, this development remained technically limited.
Struggling through the marl
To reach this coal, Franz Haniel had to break through the marl cover – a layer of rock, clay and water-saturated quicksand. To do so he took a technical and financial gamble: In 1832 he ordered the sinking of a shaft of his own to the south of Essen-Borbeck, which was given the name “Franz.”
It was a struggle against water, quicksand and doubt. After only a few months, a surveyor from the Essen-Werden mining authority advised him to abandon the shaft: The ground was bottomless, he said, and the work futile. The construction crew, too, initially lost the fight against the masses of water breaking in. Franz Haniel refused to be deterred. That same month he ordered a second shaft, had it lined, pumped and secured, and finally ordered a high-pressure steam engine from the Gutehoffnungshütte to cope with the water. The installation consumed money and patience in equal measure: By late summer 1833 the shaft was around 54 meters deep, without the coal measures having been reached.
The breakthrough finally came on 27 March 1834, after 19 months of work. Because the coal measures had still not been reached at a depth of around 54 meters, the workers drove a narrow horizontal crosscut from that point. At its end, beneath the marl, they struck a coal seam.
The moment was celebrated: Franz Haniel treated his crew at the inn of the publican Kaldenhoff. The bill, listing brandy and broken glasses, gives some idea of how great the relief must have been. Economically, however, the shaft remained a disappointment. The seam they had found was too narrow and the shaft too cramped – profitable extraction was not possible. Even so, the decisive proof had been delivered: The marl layer could be penetrated. The Franz shaft thus became the first marl shaft in the Ruhr coalfield. What had begun as an expensive and risky experiment opened up a new direction for Ruhr coal mining – northward, to greater depths and to those coal qualities that became crucial for coke, blast furnaces, and heavy industry from the middle of the 19th century onward.
High stakes, long haul
Success, then, did not come without disappointments – and it rested on Franz Haniel’s personal commitment. After the Franz shaft, he pursued the route into the depths on a neighboring field: There the “Kronprinz” colliery was established, later to be regarded as the first producing marl colliery in the Ruhr coalfield. In both ventures he largely bore the risk himself, invested considerable private funds and pressed on energetically despite warnings, setbacks and high costs. In the short term the benefits remained limited: The hoped-for fat coal was not reached in the desired quantities, extraction remained difficult, and in 1842 the merged Franz and Kronprinz collieries had to be closed. Financially this was a setback at first. For Ruhr coal mining, however, the technical proof was of a significance that can hardly be overstated.
Zollverein and Rheinpreußen: growth across generations
By then, Franz Haniel had made mining the core of his entrepreneurial thinking. A schedule from 1842 shows this: He held shares in 123 collieries as well as numerous mining claims and prospecting licenses. At around 410,000 talers, mining accounted for almost half of his assets. At the same time he remained active on colliery boards, was involved in approval procedures and, even in old age, still engaged personally with questions of technology and mining law.
This mindset later gave rise to major mining projects such as Zollverein and Rheinpreußen. The Zollverein colliery did not owe its name to chance: It recalled the German Customs Union (Zollverein) founded in 1834, which by removing internal tariffs had considerably enlarged the market for Ruhr coal and Ruhr iron. The mine developed into one of the most important in the Ruhr region and remained connected with the Haniel family across generations. Rheinpreußen, in turn, showed how far Franz Haniel was prepared to go: Mining on the left bank of the Rhine was long considered risky. Here, too, it took thinking beyond existing boundaries – and many years before the effort paid off.
The system of coal, iron and transport
Franz Haniel’s strength lay not only in acquiring colliery shares or taking technical risks. What was decisive was how closely the individual business areas meshed with one another. Coal supplied the ironworks, the ironworks delivered machinery and equipment, the ships opened up markets, and trade turned raw materials into value. After successfully building a first large steam engine in 1819, Jacobi, Haniel & Huyssen was already manufacturing a winding engine for mining in 1824. At Haniel, technology, production and the raw material base did not develop alongside one another, but with one another.
Hugo Haniel carried this legacy forward. As his father’s right-hand man, he oversaw the expansion of the colliery and industrial holdings, negotiated railroad projects and represented the interests of mining, the iron industry, transport and trade – including in dealings with government authorities. After Franz Haniel’s death he took on responsibility within the company and on the colliery boards of important Haniel mines.
A legacy that has shaped the region
The traces of this development are still visible in the Ruhr region today. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Zollverein stands for the industrial heyday of mining. Rheinpreußen, Halde Haniel and Prosper-Haniel recall an industry that shaped the landscape, the cities and the self-image of the region. When the last shift was worked at Prosper-Haniel in 2018, hard coal mining in Germany came to an end. The story behind it, however, reaches far back: to coal yards in Ruhrort, early colliery shares, bold attempts at deep mining and an entrepreneur who always understood coal as part of a larger industrial context.
