Mining Magazine November 2014

The mining industry’s leading magazine

Established

1909

Flotation

Where is flotation heading next? From reagents to new cell designs and coarse flotation, MM tracks the trends

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Bulk handling

Growing congestion on US railroads is side-lining coal and fuelling concern among power producers and miners.

MM reports on the situation

Software

Learn about the current market for business-management software and how it can be used to gain a competitive advantage

November 2014

www.miningmagazine.com 09/10/2014 17:15

REDUCE EMISSIONS INCREASE PROFITABILITY Tier 4 engine technology not only reduces ventilation requirements in your mine but also improves mobile fleet fuel economy without sacrificing performance. It’s your key to reducing emissions while increasing profitability.

Using the latest ultra-low emissions diesel engine technology, and by working with selected manufacturers, we can help you make the switch to cleaner engine technology quickly, and smoothly. We have more than 80 LHDs and underground trucks already equipped with Tier 4 engines in operation today. Visit mining.sandvik.com to learn how you can improve your underground mine environment.

CONTENTS

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World domination...

S

ame old dream. Undoubtedly the juiciest nugget of gossip this month is Glencore’s reported attempt to take over Rio Tinto; a move that would’ve created a US$160 billion natural-resources giant and the world’s biggest mining group had it been successful.

The companies went on record on October 7, to end speculation surrounding the purported deal, but which actually fuelled the media maelstrom even further.

In its media statement, Glencore confirmed that it had put in an “informal telephone call” to Rio back in July to gauge the company’s interest in a potential merger. Some say billionaire Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg put in the call personally. I can just imagine how that discussion went: Glasenberg: “So iron ore’s still looking pitiful, Jan, and Walsh’s contract is up next year. Fancy joining the Glencore “So iron ore’s still family and taking over the world?” looking pitiful, Jan, Jan du Plessis [Rio Tinto chairman]: “Well, the Xstrata and Walsh’s contract acquisition took 15 months...”

Glasenberg: “How does GlenRio sound, no wait, GlenTinto!” is up next year. Fancy joining the Glencore Du Plessis: “Er... let me have a word with the board and get back to you.” [dialling tone] family and taking Glasenberg: [Bond-villain style laugh] over the world?”

Let’s be frank, we’ve all joked about how that conversation played out!

Seriously though, Rio’s board of directors rejected the offer in August, stating that the “combination was not in the shareholders’ best interests”, and according to both parties no further contact has been made – although rumour goes that Glencore even went as far as to sound out Chinalco, Rio’s biggest shareholder with a 9.8% stake. Chinalco got involved in 2008 as Rio sought to block a US$127 million takeover from that other, slightly more benign mining behemoth, BHP Billiton. Chinalco paid £60 a share, almost double Rio’s current share price. So unless Glencore comes back with a pretty hefty raise on its offer, I suspect that an acquisition is probably not on the cards just yet.

In its statement, Glencore also acknowledged that it is now subject to Rule 2.8 of the City Code, so won’t be able to make a further bid for Rio for at least six months; a point that analysts say could be got around if the company wanted. Glencore could go hostile but, again, many feel that the premium involved would be a stretch too far for its own shareholders.

Either way, if Glencore decides to look elsewhere, there is certainly no shortage of reasonably priced assets available at the moment. When prices are low, businesses can go one of two ways: they can sit tight, cut costs and consolidate while waiting for the markets to look up, or if well positioned, they can take advantage of the situation and snap up some bargains.

Glasenberg is clearly looking to do the latter; after purchasing oil producer Caracal Energy in April, there has been talk of Glencore also taking on BHP’s troubled Nickel West business.

At the Melbourne Mining Club London dinner in June, keynote speaker Mark Cutifani, chief executive of Anglo American, noted that of the top five mining companies, the only leader who wasn’t in the room was Glasenberg. “Probably plotting his next takeover!” he mused. At the time we all laughed, but in hindsight, his comment probably wasn’t far off the mark.

CARLY LEONIDA, EDITOR carly.leonida@mining-magazine.com Twitter: @MM_Ed_Carly

News Features Mine of the month: Ghaghoo

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Column: Futurecasting

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Flotation

17

Open-pit mining

28

Snapshot

40

Bulk handling

42

Industrial minerals

52

Software

57

Flashback & contacts

63

Classified advertising

64

Next month Explosives & blasting Underground drilling Tailings management Training, simulators & skills development Dust control Buyers’ guide

COVER The Komatsu PC5500 is the most reliable shovel when it comes to operating in rough environmental conditions. Whether in the arctic regions of North America, the mountains of South America or the hot deserts of Australia, the Komatsu PC5500 is unrivaled in its performance. Delivering productivity, efficiency and ease of operation, the 29m³ (38yd³) hydraulic shovel is designed to perfectly match dump trucks ranging from 180 tonnes to 250 tonnes, such as the Komatsu 860E. www.komatsu-mining.de

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NEWS

In Brief Shell offers GTL fluids Shell has launched a portfolio of natural gas-based fluids that could find applications in mining. The high-purity paraffinic fluids are made from gas-to-liquid (GTL) products manufactured at Shell’s Pearl GTL plant in Qatar. Based on the Shell Middle Distillates Synthesis technology, the fluids and solvents are designed to offer enhanced performance.

Fluor oil-sands contract Fluor has been awarded a US$1.2 billion engineering, procurement, fabrication and construction contract by Fort Hills Energy for utilities at the Fort Hills oil-sands mine in Alberta, Canada. Jim Brittain, president of Fluor’s energy and chemicals business for the Americas region, said Fluor will apply its third-generation Modular Execution technology.

Strata goes west Strata Worldwide has opened a new facility in Huntington, Utah, US. The company said this will give it a stronger local presence, and teams of knowledgeable personnel that can service customers more effectively.

Strata will offer sales, service and support for all its product lines from the Huntington facility, but it will have a deeper focus on expanding the company’s contract mining services and electronic-safety products divisions.

ExxonMobil expands ExxonMobil Chemical is increasing production of its high-performance hydrocarbon fluids by 10% through expansion at its facilities in Singapore and Antwerp, Belgium. The extra capacity will begin producing by mid-2015 and be complete in 2016. Declan Dixon, fluids marketing manager at ExxonMobil, explained: “ExxonMobil’s specialty products, such as our Escaid fluids, improve performance and safety in drilling and solventextraction processes for mining applications.”

Ontario invests in mining research The government of Ontario, Canada, is investing in miningindustry research that will reduce operating costs and enhance miner safety. The province is providing support through the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp (NOHFC) for two projects led by Sudbury, Ontario-based research organisations.

The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) is creating a mobile canopy system to enable mining companies to develop tunnels faster while keeping workers and equipment safe. CEMI enlisted Mining Technologies International (MTI), now owned by Joy Global, to design and construct a prototype canopy. The design incorporates two overlapping canopies: a face canopy and a support canopy to protect machines and operators.

This allows for the drilling and charging of the face to occur while ground support is installed behind the face equipment. The design enables the face canopy to contract, partially collapse, and allows for

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne made the funding announcement travel inside the support canopy to and from the face.

Using the former MTI underground test mine site, the canopy prototype has already undergone testing to determine its functionality and strength. Preliminary results show that the canopy is able to withstand 75t of static load.

CEMI also engaged Labrecque Technologies to conduct process simulations on the use of the canopy (including the effect of jumbo-charging, continuous mucking and various face diameters) in an effort to assess the impact of each variation on the

Orica and CSIRO sign fresh research deal at IMARC Orica has signed a five-year alliance with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) that will focus on commercialising new technologies to improve productivity and environmental performance in the mining sector.

The agreement was signed by Ian Smith, managing director and CEO of Orica, and Dr Megan Clark, CEO of CSIRO, on the sidelines of Aspermont’s IMARC mining and resources conference in Melbourne, Australia. It follows a A$25 million (US$22 million) agreement signed by the companies in 2009 to help improve the competitiveness of Australian mining.

Smith said: “Over the past five years, Orica and the CSIRO have been engaged in a hunt for innovation across the mining value chain and to date our partnership has achieved very pleasing results.

“The second agreement signed today will allow a number of these

Dr Megan Clark of CSIRO and Ian Smith of Orica ground-breaking research projects to continue their progression towards commercialisation.”

Research milestones achieved so far by the alliance include: • T he development of a new catalyst system targeting greenhouse-gas abatement in high-pressure nitric-acid plants; • T he awarding of a patent on conductive polymers as an alternative technology to replace wire in detonating systems; and • T he filing of a patent application this year for a new method of ore/waste boundary mapping that minimises ore dilution.

development process. CEMI stated that the initial results are very promising and will help in further refinements of the design during future field trials of the canopy.

CEMI is also preparing to build two new prototypes for trials in a drift-advance scenario. The groundwork for phases 2 and 3 of this project is being planned and the improvements resulting from phases 1, 2 and 3 are expected to reduce the overall cycle time and increase advance rates by 45%.

By speeding up the development of deep mineral deposits, the provincial investment will help make it more cost-effective to open new mines. Ontario is providing C$783,916 (US$703,000) to the canopy project.

In addition, the Canadian Mining Industry Research Organization (CAMIRO) is testing filters to protect miners from pollutants from underground diesel equipment. The province is providing C$100,000 (US$90,000) for the diesel-emissions reduction research project.

Rio’s Mine of the Future goes 3-D As part of its Mine of the Future programme, Rio Tinto has developed a three-dimensional mapping technology, which it said will help it to capture a crucial advantage in the recovery of mineral deposits.

The RTVis 3-D software package provides pinpoint accurate mapping that improves the efficiency of mining activity by ensuring it is tightly focused on removing high-value ore, significantly reducing both waste and operational costs. Rio said that RTVis creates 3-D images of mine-pit activities, which allow sharper ore boundary identification, more accurate blasting, reduced use of explosives, improved waste classification and enhanced dig rates.

The new 3-D technology is currently deployed at Rio Tinto’s West Angelas iron ore mine in Western Australia, and trials are also under way in other Rio Tinto product groups including copper, energy and diamonds and minerals.

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NEWS Norilsk Nickel and Outotec seal Chita deal

The bigger picture

Kumba Iron Ore, part of Anglo American, has reconfigured its Sishen iron ore mine in South Africa to make it more efficient. The mine has produced more than 900Mt of iron ore and still has 864.1Mt of proven and probable reserves. Operations are expected to last another 20 years. However, as the mine gets older and deeper, it becomes more complex and costlier to operate.

Sishen’s orebody was previously mined from south to north, covering the full 14km strike length (see photo), but the mining direction was recently

switched by 90° to access the ore more efficiently, although more waste has to be extracted.

Management has devised a strategy that will eliminate 600Mt of waste from the life-of-mine plan, and also introduce ways to work smarter. The plan targets a faster increase in iron ore produced in relation to waste mined so that, by 2016, Sishen will be mining 37Mt of ore with 270Mt of waste.

The pit constraints started to emerge in 2008 after Sishen commissioned its new jig plant to beneficiate a mix of ‘A’ and ‘B’ grade material.

Maptek announces BlastLogic 2.0 Maptek has released BlastLogic 2.0, the latest version of its drill-and-blast accuracy management system.

BlastLogic supports blast-byblast analytics, allowing comparison of blasts across a mine to correlate design, execution and results. The performance can be analysed to ensure that every aspect of the drill-and-blast process is fine-tuned to reduce costs in downstream processing and continuously improve overall mine productivity.

Mark Roberts, product manager for BlastLogic, explained: “Getting the fundamentals of drill and blast right every time is crucial. Better blast performance leads to better fragmentation, which in turn leads to easier handling and processing of excavated material. Improving fragmentation for example has a direct impact on ‘digability’ and can lead to shovel gains of 10%.”

Other factors that can aid downstream productivity include explosives loading and blast timing controls. BlastLogic Version 2.0 adds tie-up tools, blast modelling and inventory

management for tracking and improving blast performance.

With tie-up tools, users can quickly create and compare multiple design scenarios.

BlastLogic 2.0 directly targets fragmentation, vibration and overpressure issues, providing blast-modelling previews to help determine whether the design will produce the desired outcome.

Maptek said that with BlastLogic, inventory management is linked to blast results. A site catalogue tracks and reconciles explosives received, dispatched and used. This information can be easily referenced and analysed to improve forecasting.

Roberts continued: “BlastLogic effectively provides a live window to what’s happening in the field.

Immediate access to production data, analysing results in real time and making changes on the fly mean all teams are working in sync. Sharing and analysing data instantly at critical stages helps clarify priorities. BlastLogic puts operations in a position to make decisions that ensure they get the best drill-and-blast performance.”

Outotec will deliver mineral-processing technology and equipment to Norilsk Nickel’s Bystrinskoe copper concentrator in the Chita region of Russia.

The parties have not disclosed the contract price, but the value of comparable deliveries is typically US$51-77 million.

Outotec's scope of delivery includes the main process equipment for the crushing and grinding complex as well as commissioning services and spare parts for two years. Deliveries are scheduled to be complete in mid-2016.

Once fully operational in 2017, the Bystrinskoe concentrator complex will process over 10Mt/y of ore.

Emerson makes scanning easier Emerson Process Management has introduced the Rosemount 5708 Series of 3-D solids scanners for the continuous measurement of level, volume and mass of bulk solids and powders in stockpiles, bins and silos.

The new series uses acoustic measurement and 3-D mapping technologies to provide accurate and reliable results even when measuring uneven or sloping surfaces under dusty conditions.

Emerson stated that the Rosemount 5708 Series scanners provide highly accurate measurements of stored contents for improved process and inventory control.

Unlike laser-based technologies that can take several hours to take measurements and require the process to be shut down, Rosemount 3-D solids scanners provide continuous volume measurements that are representative of the material’s surface.

They can measure practically any kind of material, including difficult-to-measure fly ash and materials with a low dielectric that would challenge other technologies.

The self-cleaning design requires low maintenance even when used in the dustiest environments.

There are models to deliver

Emerson says its Rosemount scanners can measure materials that challenge other scanners either level data only or both level and volume data using intuitive monitoring software. The scanner maps the uneven surface typically found in solids applications and can provide the minimum and maximum level, the total volume and a 3-D visualisation of the surface.

The 5708 Series includes level scanners for silos up to 5m in diameter and 70m in height, and there is also a version for larger vessels and silos up to 12m diameter and 70m height. Emerson can also supply systems of multiple devices to cover large areas such as 30m x 70m warehouses.

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WE NEVER STOP We are at it again, with the introduction of the DM 75 blasthole drill to non-Tier 4 engine markets.

Filling the gap between the DML and PV-275, the DM 75 is a multi-pass blasthole drill rig capable of reaching depths of 51.2 m (168 ft) with a pulldown capacity of 34,020 kg (75,000 lbf). With a wide hole range between 229 to 270 mm (9”–105/8”), the DM 75 has been modernized to meet the demands of today’s expanding mining market.

To learn more about what the DM 75 blasthole drill has to offer, visit our website at www.atlascopco.com/blastholedrills.

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Cerrejon reflects on P-40 expansion

by Paul Harris Improving productivity rather than headline production is the name of the game as Colombia’s largest coal mine seeks to mitigate the effects of falling coal prices, having recently completed its US$1.3 billion P-40 expansion project.

While P-40 increased Cerrejon’s coal production and export capacity, it came on stream at a time of diminishing prices, forcing the BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Xstrata-owned company to rein in efforts to hit the 40Mt/y mark to focus on profitability.

The P-40 expansion saw Cerrejon upgrade part of its mechanised fleet in order to do more with less, such as buying a fleet of 24 320t Hitachi EH5000 trucks, which it started receiving in February 2012.

Looking after truck tyres is one of three main areas Cerrejon has targeted for improvement of the pit operation. “With tyres costing US$60,000 each, they have to last at least two years,” says Leonardo Salcedo, superintendent of reconstruction in the maintenance department. Lifting-shovel and truck productivity were other targeted areas.

RIEGL VZ -2000 Long Range, High Speed 3D Laser Scanner with Online Waveform Processing

Data capture and analysis have also become an important part of the operation. “Our trucks were operating at 92% of their planned productivity. We did a pilot project that looked at the pit roads, location of access ramps and the evenness of the floors of the loading areas. We found that by removing obstacles such as narrow roads and uneven slopes, and doing more operator training, we achieved 112% of planned productivity levels,” said mining superintendent Jose Luis Prieto.

Telemetry systems provide real-time information about operating conditions with alarms when there is poor equipment operation to allow mine managers to intervene and optimise pit performance. With fuel costing US$120/h per truck, optimising journey times and reducing waiting makes big savings.

A Mastermyne team at work for the DMS and Mastermyne management and workforce.”

DMS operates throughout the Bowen Basin, Gladstone, Mackay and the Hunter Valley for a range of clients in mining, downstream metalliferous processing, prime contracting and mining infrastructure. The company has approximately 300 employees.

STATIC laser scanning

MOBILE laser mapping

RIEGL VZ®-2000: Long Range, High Speed 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanner for Stand-alone Static and Kinematic Laser Scanning 1 MHz PRR | up to 400,000 effective meas/sec. | up to 240 scan lines/sec. | 2,000 m long range scanning on natural targets | 100° x 360° Field of View | eyesafe Laser Class 1 | fully customizable scan parameters | high accuracy, high precision ranging based on echo digitization and online waveform processing | multiple target capability | MultipleTime-Around (MTA) processing | highresolution photogrammetry integration | various interfaces | ideally suited for Stand-alone Static Laser Scanning and, with RIEGL VMZ, for Mobile Laser Mapping RIEGL offers a whole family of proven 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanners: high accuracy (5 mm / 8 mm), measurements up to 600 / 1,400 m VZ-4000 / VZ-6000 ultra long ranges up to more than 4,000 / 6,000 m, accuracy 15 mm VZ-400 / VZ-1000

www.riegl.com RIEGL LMS GmbH, Austria

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Cerrejon coal mine, Colombia

Mastermyne expands with Diversified Mining Services Mastermyne Group is to acquire Diversified Mining Services (DMS), a Queensland, Australia-based maintenance, engineering and contract mining services provider, for A$20 million (US$17.5 million).

Tony Caruso, CEO of Mastermyne, said: “DMS is a wellrespected service provider, which will significantly increase the range of services that the Mastermyne Group can offer to the mining and other industries.

“We look forward to them joining the Mastermyne team and we are very confident that this acquisition will not only bring major benefits to the company but will also provide ongoing opportunities

NEW

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RIEGL Japan Ltd.

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NEWS

ABB launches MIDAS Library Buenavista del Cobre mine

Tenova joins Buenavista club

Tenova Mining & Minerals’ US-based business, Tenova Mining & Minerals USA, has been awarded a contract to design and supply two 3km-long overland conveyors for the Quebalix IV project, located at Grupo Mexico’s Buenavista del Cobre mine in Sonora, Mexico.

The overland conveyors will deliver coarse copper downhill to the leach dump at 12,000t/h.

Combined, the system includes five variable-frequency 2,700kW drive assemblies, which continuously return electric power to the grid during operations.

The Quebalix project is located at the same mine as the Copper Concentrator Expansion II project, where Tenova Mining & Minerals USA has designed and delivered a total of 22 high-capacity overland and in-plant conveyors. Several more Quebalix systems are in the planning stage for the mine.

Schneider offers mid-voltage VFDs Schneider Electric has released Altivar 1260 – a range of mediumvoltage (MV) variable-frequency drives from 522 to 5,593kW, available in 3.3KV or 4.16KV output voltage ratings.

The drives are suited for large pump, fan and compressor applications and complement the company’s portfolio of bundled power solutions, including distribution gear, MV soft starters, plant equipment and services.

Steve Blomquist, manager, US drive systems, industry business at Schneider Electric, said: “Given the increased drive activity we have seen and the continuing shift toward MV applications within metals and mining, it is critical that we offer a UL-certified MV drive.

Schneider Electric is very pleased to be offering this drive for the US, Canadian and Mexican markets.”

ABB has released the new System 800xA MIDAS Library, which it stated gives the engineers who operate automated mines a more powerful way to rapidly troubleshoot electrical systems through a remote substation.

MIDAS stands for ‘mining integrated distribution automation system’. The library works within ABB’s System 800xA, which is a platform for monitoring and controlling automated industrial processes. It is based on the International Electrotechnical Commission’s 61850 standard, which creates a common language for automated substations and power-distribution systems.

ABB’s MIDAS Library The main capability is to give plant technicians better information about the state of their electrical systems and to allow them to remotely control and correct those systems. ABB said an operator who is using the MIDAS Library will be able to monitor the whole mine’s electrical infrastruc-

ture from a single workstation using a single software package.

The analytics are presented in real time using a graphic interface that is designed to be both comprehensive and intuitive.

ABB suggested that this will in turn create other benefits: for example, the ability to diagnose faults without going on site means greater safety for workers.

Furthermore, the fact that process and power automation can be managed by one common system reduces the cost of training and spare parts. The combination of information allows processes to be fine-tuned so that they use as little energy as possible.

Cavity Profiler offers insight below ground Renishaw’s new 3-D laser scanning software is designed to speed up underground mapping and modelling for the mining and geotechnical industries.

According to Renishaw, Cavity Profiler is quick to deploy, provides efficient scanning and rapid data visualisation, editing and processing. The software is available in two versions, to support either the Renishaw Void Scanner – a specialist, boomdeployable underground laser scanner – or the Renishaw C-ALS, a slimline, borehole-deployable laser scanner. The Cavity Profiler

A sample Cavity Profiler view software replaces all earlier versions and is being made available to existing customers, free of charge.

Martin Carr, business manager, mining systems at Renishaw, said: “Our new software offers customers many efficiency

FLSmidth and ANTAM join forces

FLSmidth has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with PT ANTAM (Persero), a diversified mining and metals company headquartered in Jakarta, to supply design, testing and services for developing mining projects in and around Indonesia.

The MoU was signed on September 3 by Tato Miraza, president director of ANTAM, and Thomas Schulz, CEO of FLSmidth.

Under the agreement, FLSmidth

The MoU signatories

will assist in the development of plant designs, provide pilot testing, support the integration of plants with other technologies, facilitate co-engineering, direct ways in which to optimise costs, provide operation and maintenance services as well as training services, and offer evaluation services for existing facilities.

Schulz commented: “This is a significant agreement, as we work with ANTAM to provide our expertise and services to a broad range of processes including ferro-nickel, gold, alumina, copper and cement.

These are industries that FLSmidth has vast experience working with at mine sites and cement plants throughout the world.”

benefits. Training needs are reduced through intuitive design and guided workflow. Successful scanning is supported by better visualisation of the probe and live viewing of incoming point data.

“We’ve also introduced one-click surfacing and volume calculation for on-site modelling and ensured easy integration with third-party processing software packages. These changes make it quicker and simpler for customers to capture accurate data, even in remote voids, and make it possible to use the data captured in their mine-mapping software.”

DriftShot simplifies underground blasting

Dyno Nobel and DetNet have launched a new electronic initiation system for underground development blasting, DriftShot, designed to be easy-to-use and reliable. Its accuracy can help deliver better advance rates and wall stability.

DriftShot has flexible timing options that assist in providing more consistent fragmentation and reduced overbreak to optimise development blasting.

The blast-control unit allows for up to 200 detonators per channel to be fired. DriftShot also offers minimal components at the face – just the electronic DriftShot detonator in the borehole and a two-wire busline.

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Mine of the month

An overview of the Ghaghoo mine site

Tunnelling to access Ghaghoo’s riches Gareth Tredway attended the opening of Gem Diamonds Botswana’s Ghaghoo diamond

“The mine and reflects on some of the challenges encountered during development Ghaghoo US$95 million to build the first phase.

Gabarone, the name Gope translates ix years ago the financial crisis project was “We eventually came up with a literally to “nowhere”. forced a major rethink on how the the first In May 2007, Gem Diamonds bought Ghaghoo project, a kimberlite different plan, and that was to build the [OFTS deposit covered by 80m of sand in the the asset from a De Beers/Xstrata joint mine in a phased way. Our board was venture for US$34 million.

The kimberlite Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), able to make available to us just under tunnel] ever was originally discovered in 1982 by would be developed.

US$100 million of capital,” said Elphick. done at -8° Falconbridge, which was later bought Gope, as it was originally known, was A challenging drive from the envisioned as a US$500 million open pit out by Xstrata.

Just over a year later, the financial with 18 months and US$250 million Redpath Mining was contracted to sink horizontal worth of stripping required before the crisis hit, forcing management to come the 458m-long shaft through the soft and orebody was even reached. up with a new way of mining the deposit. Kalahari sand and Lawrence Schultz, the So innovative was the decline through Instead, on September 5, 2014, the southern African operations director, through US$95 million mine was opened. In order the Kalahari sand that chief executive said it was a unique opportunity.

80m to access the orebody, it has been Clifford Elphick insists it could unlock “According to our knowledge, this is other projects in a similar predicament. the first project of its kind. There have (vertical developed as the southern African “We had to think about this first underground diamond been several horizontal tunnels created depth) of country’s completely differently. We had to mine. The footprint is much smaller than before in both Durban and the UK using Kalahari if an open pit had been developed, with ration the capital and find different the open-face tunnel shield (OFTS) in the area taking up just 20km shallow applications (no deeper than Elphick told media before of the approaches,” sand”

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52,000km2 CKGR. It is also very remote, with no power lines or tarred roads servicing the asset.

About an hour’s flight north of

the official opening. The mine was developed without a feasibility study, as the cost of such a study was estimated at US$75 million, which is not far off the

20m below the surface) and through topsoil.

“The Ghaghoo project was the first one ever done at -8° from the horizontal

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Mine of the month

and through 80m (vertical depth) of Kalahari sand,” he explained.

The sand is very soft with a uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of 1MPa in the initial phases, soft enough to be excavated by hand with a normal shovel.

However, as the tunnel progressed deeper down through the Kalahari sands, the team encountered harder layers of calcrete with a UCS of approximately 200Mpa. Breaking this material required special drilling and blasting techniques.

The project presented some key challenges, including: • F allout of the sand in the roof before installation of the concrete lining segments: As the concrete rings installed above the OFTS are contiguous, it was difficult to see what was happening in the roof above. To overcome the creation of voids above the tunnel, strict monitoring of the excavated volumes was required.

• F allout on the face: The sand in the face of the tunnel would start to dry after approximately four hours' exposure to the ventilation air discharged at the face. This in turn caused uncontrolled runs of sand from the face, which were challenging at times. Redpath, however, managed this challenge and moved the OFTS forward in each four-hour cycle.

• Maintaining a constant grade: Excessive overbreak in the hard

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calcrete areas and zones where the sand was extremely wet were challenging. There was no means of lifting the OFTS up in the front, so the overbreak and sand moisture levels had to be carefully monitored.

Initially, Redpath achieved a daily advance of 2.4m/d building up to 4.8m/d. The contractual daily advance rate was 3.6m/d and this milestone was achieved overall. Accurate monitoring of the volumes of sand and calcrete removed daily with each advance cycle was crucial in determining whether there was a void above the tunnel or not.

The equipment used to develop the

tunnel included an OFTS fitted with 26 hydraulic thrust cylinder jacks at the back to propel it forward from the previous installed segmental concrete ring. On the face side of the OFTS, there were eight hydraulic thrust cylinders to stabilise the OFTS against the face and prevent it from toppling forward.

There were six working platforms within the OFTS from which the employees could work and lash the face in the sand portions, and also drill and charge the face in the harder portions of the tunnel.

After encountering the harder calcrete sections, the OFTS was modified to carry a telescopic hood on the top portion to

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“As the tunnel progressed deeper down, the team encountered harder layers of calcrete.

Breaking this material required special drilling and blasting techniques”

The access tunnel at Ghaghoo has been hailed as the first of its kind

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Mine of the month

Front view of the shield used at the Ghaghoo diamond mine in Botswana

prevent sudden sand inflows, and the working platforms were redesigned to extend 1.2m ahead of the OFTS so as to apply pressure against the face when required.

In the rear section of the OFTS were two hydraulic winches mounted to two

separate arrester arms and a hydraulic centre lift. The two arrester arms and their respective winches were used to install the segmental concrete rings (each weighing 470kg) in place before bolting the segment to the previous ring, and to the segment above and

below it. The central hydraulic lift was used for installing the “key block”.

Malthoid packers were inserted between the segments, which assisted with sealing the grouting behind the segments (the area between the segmental tunnel and the excavated hole in the sand was filled with a cementitious grout to preserve the integrity of the tunnel).

Schultz said the company has now proved the concept and is looking at other opportunities for similar projects: “We have paid our school fees and believe that we have improved on the original proposed method and equipment,” he explained.

“By being the pioneers we have learnt many lessons, and should we conduct a similar project, we will most definitely apply experience gained from the Ghaghoo project.”

Ghaghoo itself managed a logistical contractor to transport all equipment and stores from the nearby town of Lephephe to the site.

Redpath’s priority in this regard was placing orders at carefully planned times in both Botswana and South Africa to ensure that deliveries to Lephephe were either ahead of time or on time. Spare stock holding was a

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Mine of the month

critical piece of the puzzle so that breakdowns could be properly managed.

Development of the decline began in December 2011 and was completed in May 2013.

Looking ahead On surface, Ghaghoo has a crushing and grinding circuit with an autogenous grinding (AG) mill, similar to that used at Lucara Diamond Corp’s Karowe operation in Botswana. Gem believes AG milling is the best way of releasing

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and liberating as many diamonds as possible.

The 720,000t/y Ghaghoo mine will produce 200,000-220,000ct/y in phase 1 at diamond prices expected to average about US$267/ct, according to the 2013 resource statement. About 250,000-300,000ct are expected in 2015.

Early indications from the first 2,400ct recovered by the end of June are that the stones are better than samples obtained during exploration; a 20ct and two 10ct diamonds have been

recovered, compared with the largest diamond recovered in the exploration sample of 7ct.

In the first 2,400ct, the average stone size is 0.5-1.5ct.

A better idea on the costs will be evident towards the end of the year as the company said it was in the transition phase of handing over from the building teams to the operational teams. A sale of about 20,000ct in Antwerp before the year-end should give a good indication of what can be expected.

This will also allow management to conduct follow-up studies on how to develop the project further.

“As soon as the data starts coming in and we get more confident, that work will begin immediately. Haile [Mphusu, managing director of Gem Diamonds Botswana] wants to settle the mine and get the mine operating well. I want to start the expansion process right away, so there is a bit of tension in the ranks.

But we didn’t build this mine to remain a 250,000-odd carat producer. We want the mine’s full potential to be achieved,” said Elphick.

Botswana’s president, Lieutenant General Seretse Khama Ian Khama, addressed guests at the ceremony and officially opened the mine.

13

Botswana’s president, Lieutenant General Seretse Khama Ian Khama, spoke at the official opening of the mine

“Haile wants to settle the mine and get the mine operating well. I want to start the expansion process right away, so there is a bit of tension in the ranks”

10/10/2014 10:15

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futurecasting

pathways take the place of giant machines on broad roads. Four 100t trucks working in tandem, with one driver, are more flexible than one 400t truck. This modularity allows operators to modify production levels and shift resources in real-time to match demand.

Enabled by sensor placement on everything, smaller production and development footprints become realistic. Sensor-based actions do not rely on imperfect human reactions and, unlike human eyes, sensors cannot miss an obstacle.

With computers calculating and implementing perfect acceleration and deceleration curves, mines will become smaller and safer. This will also increase equipment reliability and reduce the cost of the entire operation.

Autonomy & efficiency

Ideas for The Rock Factory include an exoskeleton to give operators more strength, 3-D printing of equipment parts, and automated, continuous mining

George Hemingway and Jeff Loehr

The Rock Factory In the second article of their six-part series, Jeff Loehr and George Hemingway of the Stratalis Group outline their vision for macroscale mines of the future

I

n our first article, 'The future of mining', we introduced Futurecasting, a powerful tool that we use to help the resource industry to discover opportunity by crafting possible visions of the future.

Our visions are enabled by technology and framed by industrial, societal and economic trends that set the stage for why change is required.

These trends suggest that future mining operations will be: • S calable, to take advantage of shifts in market demand; • R educed, in operating and capital structure, to meet investor demands; • A daptable, to achieve the above; • C onsistent, with low variability and predictable risk as key to production flow; • S afe, with humans far from hazard; and • S ustainable, from both environmental and societal standpoints.

We have crafted two operating futures that meet these criteria. This article describes the first, which we call The Rock Factory. This mine is an integrated system that moves continuously, like a factory, from the face to the processing facilities to product delivery.

In this world, mines still break rock and move many tonnes. The mine uses relatively large mining machines, at first glance resembling a mine operating today.

What makes it different, however, is that everything is optimised to be predictable, stable and transparent, with variability in inputs, outputs and production kept to a minimum. A vast amount of data is collected and everything that can have a sensor on it does.

The Rock Factory is organised and compact. Smaller, modular components working together on minimised

The Rock Factory operates continuously with integrated maintenance. Machines run longer, with programming optimised to reduce wear and tear.

Modularity also means that each individual component is less critical to the operation; in the case of a breakdown, losing 100t of capacity has less of an impact than losing 400t.

Smaller modules are also less expensive to acquire as well as to maintain, bringing down costs.

The maintenance process itself is improved, becoming both more predictive and more efficient. By analysing diagnostic information, algorithms predict when something will fail and remove it for upkeep beforehand.

When breakdowns occur, 3-D printing could be used to create maintenance parts; this same technology could also be applied to entire machines. The ability to print on site means that suppliers could ship digital blueprints and the mines would do the rest. Stores and stocks could also be reduced.

Autonomous systems in the mine require much less human interaction, and the role of people becomes higher level, focused on mine planning, analysis and maintenance.

Humans entering the operating area do so by exception, bringing their own protection. With machine autonomy, expensive, “hazard free” mines are less important.

Instead, safety systems are designed around the individual. Cool suits protect workers in hot environments and mechanical exoskeletons provide augmented strength. Head-up displays

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.com 10/10/2014 10:47

futurecasting

provide real-time information to improve accuracy.

Continuous operations are supported by new blended breakage and logistics technologies. Batch blasting is replaced by a continuous breakage model that combines physical breakage, preconditioning and possibly new forms of safer blasting that do not require clearing of mining areas. New forms of logistics characterise the ore and even preconcentrate it. Machines that scoop also map. Every part is multi-functional.

The real glue holding The Rock Factory together is information. To make the mine work, operations and management rely on the mining, processing and targeted delivery of clear and reliable information about production, equipment, orebodies and the machines themselves.

Technology convergence None of the technology outlined here is new. All of this is, in one form or another, happening today. The higher-order technology concepts that enable The Rock Factory are: •M echanised blended breakage:

•

•

•

novel machines that blend pre-conditioning, controlled explosives, boring, cutting and drilling technologies to continuously move forward are being developed by our clients and their suppliers.

A dvanced autonomous robotics: advanced robotics with sensory awareness can overcome uneven and dynamic terrain. Drones that auto-land on aircraft carriers and cars that drive across the country demonstrate that ‘smart’ robots are a reality.

F ully visualised, data-driven systems: made possible by the proliferation of sensors and drones that can survey operations and by new visual-data systems. Big Data technologies are supporting data-driven decisions, predictive analytics and scenario planning in mining.

I ntegration of people and technology: cool suits for hot environments are under development, while exoskeletons for increased strength and protection now allow the disabled to walk.

Head-up displays convey real-time

•

•

augmented reality information in many applications.

S elf-sustainability technologies: new energy generation, saving and storage technologies, water recycling and underground pre-concentration technologies have all advanced.

3 -D printing: now capable of printing houses, rocket parts and more, this technology is developing at a rapid pace and promises to change supply chain and maintenance completely.

We believe that The Rock Factory is realistically obtainable in the near future and is partially implementable with existing technologies today. No one piece of technology will make it a reality. The real benefits can only be realised by putting together a technological system. This can be implemented in value-adding stages, with each stage building towards a complete long-term vision.

Next month we “go small” and explore the concept of a bio-technological mining ecosystem in what we call The Living Mine.

15

“We believe that The Rock Factory is realistically obtainable in the near future and is partially implementable with existing technology today”

The Stratalis Group is a full-service strategy and innovation consultancy focused on helping companies in the resource industry to discover, develop and deliver new pathways to growth, increased profitability and ROI. See: www.stratalisgroup.com

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How do you achieve successful flotation?

By using the right collector

AkzoNobel is a leading global supplier of flotation collectors for industrial minerals and iron ores. We have more than 50 years of experience in research and development in molecular and surface chemistry together with a solid knowledge of the field.

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Working with every customer as a partner rather than as a traditional supplier, we approach each assignment individually. We create solutions to meet specific processing needs, whether they require tailor-made or standard collectors.

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Flotation

17

Staying the coarse Ailbhe Goodbody looks at recent trends in flotation, including coarse flotation, and companies’ predictions for the future of the technology

M

any of the accessible, highquality deposits around the world have already been mined, and as a result typical ore grades are getting lower.

As ore grades are depleted, the utilisation and optimisation of flotation becomes even more important, but the challenges to flotation-plant operators increase – they can create inefficiencies in the flotation process, such as reducing the recovery and grades in target minerals. If a typical float has a 15% grade feed and it drops to 10% grade feed, the plant has to process 50% more feed to yield the same amount of concentrate tonnes.

As feed grade drops, operators are looking to compensate with higher throughput rates in order to maintain

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metal value production. This affects flotation directly by trending toward larger machines to achieve economy of scale, and indirectly by favouring flotation at the coarsest practicable particle size to reduce grinding costs.

However, increased throughput results in increased energy, water consumption and waste, all of which present an economic challenge. The increased amount of water required for making a unit of concentrate has implications for reagents.

In addition, lower ore grades require more attention from mill operators to insure optimum output, and may even require more sophisticated engineering designs. This may result in additional costs to the operating company and excess training time for operators.

DR Nagaraj, principal research fellow at Cytec, says: “Low-grade ores tend to be of poor quality as well, and signal several secondary impacts on the flotation process: more complex ore mineralogy, especially gangue minerals, and more complex water chemistry and pulp viscosity, and sometimes increased penalty elements such as arsenic. All of these factors have made separation of metal values and gangue more difficult, impacting both recovery and grade, and overall economics.”

Dr Pablo Dopico, global businessdevelopment manager at Clariant Mining, notes: “It is not as simple as getting more mass in tailings and less concentrate. New gangue contaminants come into play as ore grades decrease, leading to the need for more complex

ArrMaz is involved in flotation projects in practically every region where industrial minerals are floated

November 2014 10/10/2014 10:19

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Flotation

“Large cells are no longer designed as banks of cells with a common level control, but now have level controls for each cell, or at most each pair of cells.

‘Lip loading’ has now become the ‘froth handling strategy’, with carry rate and transport distance to be considered, particularly for coarse-particle flotation.

Low turbulence is also desirable for coarse-particle flotation, so careful design goes into maintaining a minimum velocity compatible with particle suspension.”

A 660m3 FLSmidth SuperCell

Flotation reagents

and customised flow sheets, more sophisticated collectors, co-collectors, depressants and frothers.”

Tank design

“As ore grades are depleted, the utilisation and optimisation of flotation becomes even more important”

The requirement for increased throughput means that large flotation volumes are also needed to maintain a given concentrate production. Dariusz Lelinski, manager – flotation product development at FLSmidth, says: “Larger throughput requires either a higher number of flotation machines or larger flotation cells. The combination of these two factors (low feed grade and high demand) is the main factor leading to the development of larger flotation machines.”

Antti Rinne, director – flotation at Outotec, explains: “A simplified example is to compare some of the very best copper mines from some decades ago that had up to 5% copper head grade in the ore. The lowest head grade copper mines at the moment have roughly 0.25% copper in the ore.

Normal flotation-cell size was approximately 10-20m3 a few decades ago, and during the last few years the 300m3 cell became the standard.”

In this example, considering that the number of cells and all other parameters have remained the same, cells that are 20 times larger are needed to keep the total copper production the same.

Many flotation equipment suppliers are now designing mechanical cells in the range of 600 - 660m3 to handle higher throughputs. Complex ores are handled by a combination of specific reagents and fine grinding. Despite cell size, the basic principles of flotation remain the same – the particles still need to be suspended and contacted

with the bubbles, and the bubbles need to be dispersed. The level needs to be controlled, and the froth removed in a timely fashion.

As cell sizes increase, care must be taken about structural/mechanical stability, recovery of coarse particles and sanding. However, all of these factors are normally studied during a ‘beta-test’ campaign at a customer’s site.

One of the most important issues in upscaling flotation equipment in general is to keep an eye on the physical-chemical conditions inside the tank. When developing large flotation cells, special attention is given to parameters/designs related to froth recovery, especially lip length loading and froth carrying capacity.

Along with the potential structural problems, there is also the control of the process. With rising diameters, the turbulent flow inside the cell gets more complex. In addition, with taller cells, the hydrostatic pressure inside the vessel influences the bubble-particle interaction. Sven Menger, product manager at Siemens Hybrid Flotation, says: “The major challenge is to keep the efficiency of the process while upscaling.”

He adds: “Due to the higher investment costs that come along with bigger machines and the high impact of core processes such as flotation, simulation becomes more and more important to evaluate the behaviour of the new equipment.”

Brock Taplin, manager of mineral processing at Westpro, explains: “The move toward larger cells has invalidated many of the ‘rules’ previously used in the design of small conventional cells.

The reagents used in flotation have not changed much as a result of lower grade ores – most of the reagents available today have been available for the past 30 years. Frank Cappuccitti, president of Flottec, says: “It is the application of the reagents and the control of the circuits that can have the greatest impact.”

Engineering solutions have limited impact when the problems are related to chemical aspects, so mine operators have turned to chemical suppliers to provide better characterisation of processing problems and better collector, frother and modifier chemistry solutions to address these challenges in both existing plants and greenfield projects.

Traditional collectors are usually used, unless there is some problem with mineralogy or penalty elements that requires the use of more exotictype collectors or depressants. In cases where there is a need to keep pH lower and still get selectivity against gangue sulphides in order to keep pH modifier costs down, then more selective collectors and depressants are used that work at lower pH and provide better separation efficiency.

To deal with more complex ores, operators can also introduce additional flotation steps, adding complexity to their beneficiation plants, or they can choose more selective collectors.

Danny Canady, North American technical manager at Clariant Mining, comments: “It is generally true that the more selective collectors are more expensive to produce than traditional collectors. However, they give the plants the advantage of allowing continued operation with simpler flow sheets, and in some cases even allow for elimination of other reagents such as depressants or co-collectors.”

Accommodating higher throughputs and lower-grade/more complex ores can require the adoption of optimal flotation-reagent suites that consider

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When searching for a large cell capacity to reduce footprint and operating costs, look no further than FLSmidth. We have successfully installed over 256 of our 250m3 cells and have sold more than 130 of our 300m3 SuperCell™ flotation cells. FLSmidth continues to lead the way with our new 660m3 SuperCell™ flotation machine, the largest in the world.

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Flotation

Tenova Delkor’s small and medium-size BQR flotation cells have been used for over 10 years

“The chance of a coarse particle being recovered with conventional flotation is inversely proportional to its size, so there are a lot of coarse ore particles going to tails”

collectors, frothers and modifiers.

Thomas Velgaard, global manager, fine chemicals at Cheminova, says: “While experience and metallurgical goals guide the reagent-suite optimisation efforts, ultimately this is made by using empirical methods, but this becomes increasingly important with larger cells that place a higher premium on ensuring mineral hydrophobicity as well as froth mineral-carrying capacity.

“With lower grades and/or more complex ores, it becomes even more important to test and find the optimal reagent solutions.”

Flotation reagents can be tailored at a molecular level, with specific functional groups and geometries.

These modifications are intended to target specific mineral types, increasing selectivity and recovery.

Chad Brown, technology manager, mining chemicals at Chevron Phillips Chemical Co, states: “Combinations of reagents with complimentary functionality are also being formulated to yield multiple effects. The result may be providing a single reagent to mills that can perform multiple functions. Mill operations can then implement simpler reagent packages and require less complex equipment designs.”

Josefin Lannefors, global marketing manager, mining chemicals at AkzoNobel, adds: “A way to deal with higher throughputs can be to add a booster to the reagent to enhance flotation kinetics.

“It is challenging to both improve the selectivity of the collector to achieve optimal flotation of complex ores and at the same time improve flotation kinetics to deal with higher throughputs. Most often the solution is a compromise.”

High solids and energy-intensive

conditioning steps are often used with coarser particles – this is especially true in phosphate, where coarse circuits can use rotary drum conditioners or high-powered equipment that can move high solids.

Todd Parker, global marketing manager, mining chemicals at ArrMaz, says: “The conditioning step is the most important step to good flotation, especially for coarse flotation. This is where the magic happens.”

When plants are motivated to push more tonnes through the conditioners, it shortens conditioning time, which means the reagent has to move quickly and selectively to the desired mineral surface. Many operators try to overcome the shorter time by using more reagents. This can work, but often creates a loss of selectivity, pulling more gangue.

Parker cautions: “In the world of mineral collection it is difficult to have both strength and selectivity at the same time. It takes innovative chemistry and a strong testing programme to find a collector that can provide both.

Sometimes it takes adapting the chemistry and the process at the same time to find the perfect balance of speed, selectivity and strength.”

Coarse flotation Where coarse flotation is possible, less energy is used within the process chain, resulting in lower total costs of operation. Eric Wasmund, global managing director, Eriez Flotation Division at Eriez Magnetics, says: “We know that the chance of a coarse particle being recovered with conventional flotation is inversely proportional to its size, so there are a lot of coarse ore particles that are currently going to tails.”

He adds: “If you have a good

technology for floating coarse particles, you can do less grinding, which in terms of CAPEX and OPEX is the major cost in a concentrator. Or another way to look at it – if you can float coarse, then you can push tonnes without upgrading your grinding capacity.”

Flotation of coarse particles enables mining operations to both recover values in the coarse size range and also operate the comminution circuit at a coarser economic grind set point, resulting in large energy savings irrespective of ore grade. As grinding is the major cost in mineral processing, reducing the need for grinding will substantially reduce the costs involved.

In addition, the loss within the ultra-fine particles, which need to be removed by desliming, will be reduced.

Heiko Teuber, Tenova Delkor engineering & product management, part of the Tenova Mining & Minerals Group, comments: “Throughout the flotation process, the ability to float at a coarser size reduces the amount of slimes that are created in grinding. In general, the recovery of the valuable minerals from slimes is lower.”

However, the mineralogy of the available deposits will define the technologies to be applied to recover the minerals of interest. Lelinski says: “When considering coarse flotation, special attention needs to be paid to the liberation characteristics of the treated ore.”

However, if the cost of comminution becomes a significant fraction of the value of the metal recovered from the low-grade ore, then that ore may be deemed uneconomical to process.

Ricardo Capanema, global sales director at Cytec, explains: “Of course, there is a trade-off between value recovery and processing costs. One potential solution is to recover as much of the metal as possible, and reject a significant fraction of the gangue, at a coarser economic grind, thereby significantly reducing the comminution costs.

“As more gangue is rejected at a coarser grind, the more efficient the flotation recovery and selectivity in subsequent circuits.”

Also, while coarse flotation seems attractive in principle, if the desired mineral is not liberated, then attempts to float coarse particles may be unsuccessful. At best, it will result in poor grades in the concentrate, as the valued mineral will be contaminated with the gangue that was not separated in grinding. Paul Gould, global head of marketing and technology at Clariant,

November 2014 Flotation_MM1411.indd 20

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Flotation

A Metso 300m3 flotation cell

notes: “There is always a balance to be struck between the value that can be generated from the concentrate and the cost to create it.”

The future of flotation

“Flotation cell and process control is an increasing challenge with the larger flotation cells, and the role of advanced automation systems will become increasingly important”

Froth in a flotation cell Photo: Clariant

Flotation is arguably the most cost-effective and flexible separation technique to handle very large tonnages on a continuous basis of any grade and type of ores. Considering that air is the agent for separation, cost of consumables is very low, and the operation does not require highly sophisticated equipment, flotation still makes sense for future mine operations.

It is unlikely that another technology will replace conventional mechanical flotation cells in the mineral-processing industry as it is generally a highthroughput, effective, selective and low-cost process. Velgaard says: “Flotation is an excellent technology that the industry is heavily reliant on, and flotation will continue to be the most important mineral-separation unit operation.”

Thierry Monredon, product manager at Metso, agrees: “Even if the industry is awaiting a revolutionary design that enables it to reduce CAPEX, OPEX and footprint, there is not yet any technology that is able to replace large flotation cells, especially for sulphide applications.”

However, the increased global demand for various items, including electronics and infrastructure, will require continued exploration and improvements in flotation processing.

Changing orebodies and lower-grade ores will require more sophisticated reagents and equipment designs.

Brown says: “Additionally, regulatory changes for reagents and concentrates being shipped and used in regions worldwide will require more and more attention. While these factors may

seem daunting, it will provide opportunities (and work) throughout the value chain, from reagent suppliers and equipment manufacturers to metallurgists and mill-flotation operators.”

New methods of introducing air, controlling bubble size and improving bubble-particle contact are all being developed, and research is ongoing for ultra-fine particles as well as coarse flotation. Bubble-generation techniques and bubble size control will also receive more attention in future, and at some point monitoring froth phase control will move from human to equipment monitoring.

Nagaraj predicts: “Novel flotationreagent development, including greener flotation reagents, will go hand-in-hand with innovations in the physical-mechanical aspects.”

The main trend in flotation is towards larger and larger cells, floating both finer and coarser particles than in the past. Taplin states: “Undoubtedly though, there is a point beyond which the advantages in further increase in

size are outweighed by problems or performance issues.”

Rinne predicts: “Flotation cell and process control is an increasing challenge with the larger flotation cells, and the role of advanced automation systems will become increasingly important.”

Advanced control systems that utilise, for example, froth imaging or tomography systems that can measure and control froth characteristics and continuously optimise recoveries and grades based on the information from on-stream analysers have become very useful in this application.

Another major issue will be to design flexible solutions that allow the customers to act quickly when the natural resources require changes in the process. The interaction between online analysis results and the parameter set and chemical conditioning in relation to the actual analysis results will also have great potential.

Menger says: “We expect that new trends, such as optical sorting and technologies like the fluidised bed flotation, will have a big influence on the process, but flotation will still remain a core process within the beneficiation chain.”

There is not likely to be a major invention of a new class of collectors as the fundamental research costs are so high. Simon Isherwood, director of Nasaco, suggests: “The flotation process is generally quite efficient – many operations are running at recoveries in the mid to high 90% range with acceptable selectivity. Improving recovery, though financially rewarding, involves identifying and addressing the loss. Addressing the loss can have the effect of being detrimental to the existing process.”

November 2014 Flotation_MM1411.indd 22

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Flotation

Products and projects

There are a range of companies that make flotation equipment and flotation chemicals for the mineral-processing industry.

Mining Magazine spoke to some of the main players about their recent releases and mining projects that they have supplied.

Equipment

“Another major issue will be to design flexible solutions that allow customers to act quickly when the natural resources require changes in the process”

Cutaway of the Outotec TankCell e630

Eriez’s HydroFloat is already well established in the phosphate and potash business, and the company’s flotation division is now doing test-work to study how it can be used in concentrators for base metals and gold.

Wasmund says: “This is a key component of product and application development in the mineral-processing field, since the technology needs to be well proven before it can be considered for general use. The way to do that is to create a project where the owner and the supplier both contribute and benefit from the analysis.”

FLSmidth has recently been involved in the development and start-up of its 660m3 SuperCell. Lelinski explains: “Five different mechanisms are tested: three for forced-air Dorr-Oliver cells and two for self-aspirated WEMCO cells.”

The company has also been working on the development of new, energy-efficient, forced-air mechanisms suitable to float fine and coarse particles.

Other projects include the commercialisation of the new rotor-stator combination for Dorr-Oliver forced air flotation machine, which is designed to improve selectivity and maintain recovery at lower consumed power, and the commercial application of the Vortex Stabilizer, which enhances the WEMCO flotation machine, reducing the wave on the surface and allowing for better process control. The company has also developed the Froth Miner, a device for improving coarse particle recovery.

Metso makes RCS mechanical cells ranging from 0.8 to 660m3 and Microcel columns up to 6m in diameter.

Monredon says: “Metso is one of the very few suppliers who can offer such a combination for large-size equipment, including regrind mills such as VertiMills and SMDs.” An installation of Outotec’s TankCell e500 is now up and running. Rinne comments: “The world's first 500m3 flotation cell, the Outotec TankCell e500, has created its first concentrate and based on first impressions the cell looks very promising.” The company will publish official results when they are available.

Outotec has also released the Outotec TankCell e630. It has a nominal 630m3 effective volume, and depending on its version and set-up, volumes up to almost 700m3 can be achieved. The tank diameter is 11m and typical installed power is 500kW. Specific power draw is lower than in smaller TankCells and Outotec recommends the use of a variable-frequency drive (VFD). Rinne says: “The new large flotation cells are such big production units that it is essential to be able to optimise metallurgy and energy consumption at the individual cell level.”

The TankCell e630 and TankCell e500 were developed at the same time, and all of the key components have been mechanically tested. The TankCell e630 has all the proven features of the smaller cells in the TankCell range, including the FloatForce mixing mechanism.

Rinne says: “The big decision-making driver will be its significantly improved cost compared to smaller cells. Total installed capital cost should reduce by 10-20% compared to the same plant built with TankCell e300s, and savings in OPEX are also significant.”

Siemens currently has several interesting projects in the lab-test phase that it states are showing promising results. However, due to the early stages of the projects, the company could not give any more details.

Tenova Delkor’s small and mediumsize BQR flotation cells have been used in mineral-processing applications for over 10 years. Teuber says: “As with our other products, ongoing technology development is a priority at Tenova Delkor to meet evolving industry needs.”

Westpro has completed a number of relatively conventional installations that

were optimised in service without any particular issues. Taplin notes: “Next year will see the introduction of a new rotor/stator series for conventional cells.”

Chemicals One of AkzoNobel’s recent focus areas within its flotation-development work has been to improve froth characteristics without sacrificing grade, recovery or reagent efficiency.

“Finding ways to predict froth characteristics in full scale is a big challenge,” says Lannefors. “In order to achieve this goal, we developed a new lab tool to study froth. With the successful development of this tool, along with surface chemistry knowledge, we have been able to develop several formulations in close collaboration with customers that improve the froth characteristics while achieving the same or better flotation performance.”

ArrMaz is involved in flotation projects in China, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Peru, the US and practically every region where industrial minerals are floated. It also delivers its chemicals to over 70 different countries.

Cheminova has been involved in flotation projects at several mines with the aim of improving metallurgical results with mixed ores. Increasingly, sulphide flotation mills are struggling with oxidised ore zones as poorer-quality ores are mined.

When mixed oxidised sulphide ores are fed to the mill, recoveries decrease and often concentrate grades will suffer.

Velgaard states: “Through our Danafloat product line, Cheminova has identified and supplied flotation collectors to the mines to augment their existing reagent suites and have also modified their reagent combinations, resulting in improved metallurgical results under such conditions.”

Chevron Phillips Chemical Co was recently involved in a project to develop a metal collector to replace the current collector scheme. Brown says: “In order to develop the desired flotation product, a cross-functional team of chemists, metallurgists, regulatory specialists and business personnel from both the mining company and Chevron Phillips Chemical participated in project planning.”

Multiple possibilities were identified and screened in Chevron Phillips Chemical labs for flotation performance.

November 2014 Flotation_MM1411.indd 24

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Flotation

One reagent scheme appeared to excel above the others, having the desired regulatory classification and providing improved performance. Additionally, it was a simpler formulation and could be used at lower dosage levels. Though internal testing is still under way, this new collector continues to show positive results.

Brown explains: “These types of close interactions between mining companies and reagent suppliers are invaluable for process improvements. The use of cross-functional teams to achieve the desired performance criteria is vital for step-change innovation in reagent development and for addressing future challenges in flotation operations.”

Clariant has recently developed Flotigam 5806 to help phosphate customers increase grade and recovery in phosphate flotation while lowering reagent consumption.

Nilson Bartalini, regional head for South America North at Clariant Mining, says: “The challenges in this project were a very complex gangue mineralogy and the need to deliver a low contaminant grade for multiple penalty elements.

“The Clariant product development team in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, overcame MiningFlotationAd_Layout 1 10/3/14 4:31 PM Page 1 these challenges drawing from the wide Construction of a 660m3 FLSmidth SuperCell

product portfolio of Clariant Mining Solutions and our application-development resources in Belo Horizonte, where multiple candidates were synthesised and tested with the customer’s ore to identify the optimal solution.”

Cytec recently launched AERO 7260 HFP, a polymeric depressant for the Cu-Mo separation market, which enabled a reduction of 50-75% in sodium hydrosulphide (NaSH) usage and in some cases up to 90%. This product has already been successfully implemented by several major mine operations with significant cost savings and improved

safety for workers and local communities. A paper entitled ‘Practical Aspects of Cu-Mo Separations and Alternatives to NaSH and Nokes’ was presented at the International Mineral Processing Congress (IMPC) in Santiago, Chile, by Cytec scientists.

Flottec is currently working on understanding the hydrodynamics of flotation cells and how reagents affect these hydrodynamics.

Cappuccitti tells MM: “Optimising flotation circuits requires that we maintain optimum hydrodynamic conditions in the cell. Maintaining

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optimum hydrodynamics means using all the control parameters in flotation including air, cell levels, density, reagents, where and how much to add reagents and their inter-relationships. It also includes operators understanding how to control and having the tools to measure and control.

“We are now at a point where we can

measure diagnostically the hydrodynamic conditions in a cell. We also are at a point where we understand how the control parameters can change hydrodynamics and give maximum metallurgical performance.”

However, Cappuccitti says that the next step is a real-time online measurement capability; sensors are needed to

give information in real time to affect better control.

Flottec is working on new gas hold-up sensors that could provide the real-time measurements that can be used to control flotation. Cappuccitti concludes: “These new instruments, coupled with a better understanding of hydrodynamics, with the use of mineral analysers to give a feed forward look at what is coming, operators with a greater understanding of the flotation circuit and expert systems that can assist the operators in controlling the circuit, will allow us to better apply the reagent technology that is already developed.”

Over the past five years, Nasaco and Betachem have been involved in the application of mineral liberation analysis (MLA) produced from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies of processing streams to identify problem areas and address them chemically.

Isherwood says: “We now have a dedicated unit with which we work with our customers, to identify areas of opportunity for improving recovery or grade within their process. This has had great effect on several complex ores both in fundamental investigation as well as in periodic performance analysis of operating plants.”

27

Westpro conventional flotation cells at a base-metals processing plant in Guatemala

“Optimising flotation circuits requires that we maintain optimum hydrodynamic conditions in the cell”

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open-pit mining

At the remote greenfield Solomon Hub in New South Wales, Australia, a modular design and offsite preassembly helped reduce on-site construction time and costs

Over any ground The world’s largest multiplelift mobile heapleach conveying and stacking system is the 8,550t/h Super Portable system at El Abra in Chile

supplying high-capacity belts 1.8m (72in) wide and greater for mines in the US, Australia and Chile.

Basics of conveyor design

Terra Nova Technologies examines some of the key considerations it has encountered and resolved when designing high-capacity belt conveyors for mining clients

A

conveying system can have as much design complexity as a small process plant. There are many engineering disciplines and construction trades needed for designing and building each conveyor. Earthworks, concrete, structural assemblies, mechanical and electrical components,

instrumentation, programming and operator-machine interfacing are all necessary for a conveyor to function properly and safely.

Guarding design must consider rotational and linear movement, pinch points, gravitational and stored energy, illumination, noise, medium-voltage electrocution, and often hydraulic and/ or pneumatic hazards. Another safety factor is the material being conveyed.

Pieces of material can fall from significant heights, and an improperly handled material transfer can begin burying a conveyor within seconds.

Design teams must also consider that construction resources are not limitless.

Every employee at a mine construction site must possess a certificate of training administered by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in the US, or by a similar body elsewhere, which affects the availability of labour. Belt splicing, for example, requires a specialised crew.

The following are some design issues that Terra Nova Technologies (TNT) has encountered while designing and

Belt conveyors tend to have lower operating costs than trucks and are commonly used for moving relatively dry, coarse material. Conveyors may be horizontal or inclined as much as 15-18º, and can also have gentle horizontal curves.

Material is carried on a conveyor belt, typically made of layers of either fabric or steel cords, and rubber bonded or vulcanised together. The top and bottom layers are rubber of an appropriate thickness to resist abrasion.

The belt rides on idlers – the carrying sides of high-capacity belts are always cupped by these idlers at angles of 20-45º. The belt speed is usually in the range of 1-5m/sec.

The capacity of a belt conveyor is a function of its width, speed and the troughing angle created by its carrying idlers. Long overland conveyors are normally designed with relatively narrow belts and high speeds to reduce the capital cost associated with the conveyor width (belt, idlers, pulleys, structures), while short plant conveyors and mobile conveyors will often have wider belts and slower running speeds in order to reduce belt and component wear.

For example, TNT has recently

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open-pit mining

The 15 new in-plant conveyors supplied for a concentrator restart at Morenci in the US

supplied to Freeport McMoRan’s Morenci copper mine in Arizona several 1.3m-wide (54in) overland conveyors, 1.8m (72in) mobile conveyors and 2.4m (96in) crusher feed conveyors, all carrying approximately 5,000t/h, with the belt widths and speeds optimised for each application. With higher belt speeds and larger drives, the company also supplied similar 1.8m mobile conveyors with a capacity of 8,550t/h to the El Abra copper mine in Chile.

Hilly terrain

“The seven conveyors total 15km in length and cross multiple rolling hills and valleys.

Each conveyor carries between 4,500t/h and 7,400t/h”

Working with hilly terrain, mobile stacking applications and/or operational uptime requirements can cause some special design considerations.

Starting up and shutting down an overland conveyor system that crosses hilly terrain poses design challenges that are unique to conveyors. For example, the seven overland belt conveyors that TNT supplied for the Solomon Hub (in the Pilbara region of Western Australia) centralise iron ore from multiple large mining operations and deliver it to a single train load-out facility. The seven conveyors total 15km in length and cross multiple rolling hills and valleys. Each conveyor carries between 4,500t/h and 7,400t/h.

Some of these conveyors travel uphill; some uphill then downhill; still others travel up, then down, then up again. In addition to the need for conveyor brakes, the design also had to consider the likelihood that, over decades of planned operation, these conveyors will start up under a variety of conditions: empty, fully loaded, and sometimes partially loaded (with the bulk of material resting either mostly on inclines, or mostly on declines).

The various start-up cases that will be encountered present different requirements for the drive motors and belt tensions needed to overcome starting inertia. Furthermore, the drives

and brakes are designed and sized to stop the conveyors safely under a wide range of conditions. For safe and reliable operation, drives, brakes, counterweights and other major components must be sized to operate in all plausible – and rare – conditions.

A relatively flat conveyor profile, free of undulations and associated vertical curves and aggressive slopes, can simplify the design and reduce component costs. However, in some cases this is not practical or cost-effective, since it may require extensive civil works and/or elevated truss sections in order to flatten the profile.

Often, early engineering will include a trade-off analysis to compare the costs and time required for earthworks with the extensive use of elevated trusses. Occasionally, the potential cost for earthworks is so significant that it is of greater benefit to elevate the entire length of the conveyor using bents and trusses. This was the case for four of the 15 in-plant conveyors TNT supplied to Morenci for its recent concentrator restart.

Mobile stacking An overland conveyor can feed a mobile stacking system more effectively via an integrated wheel-mounted or rail-mounted mobile tripper. A mobile tripper allows the stacking system to be fed at several possible locations along the length of the overland conveyor.

Mobile trippers normally require the overland conveyor to be free of horizontal curves and excessive vertical curves, ideally with maximum slopes of 6-8º.

For example, a 2.3km-long overland conveyor designed, supplied and built

by TNT for a copper heap-leach pad at Freeport’s Safford mine in Arizona was profiled specifically for a mobile tripper application, with the first few hundred metres descending into a valley,

followed by a gentle two-degree decline in the mobile tripper working area.

At Morenci, the crushed ore for the new leach pad (currently under construction) will need to descend from the side of a steep hill and curve around its base en route to the stacking area.

Because the mobile stacking system must be fed by a level and straight overland conveyor (due to its integrated mobile tripper), all declines and curves must occur within the upstream overland conveyors.

If it is steep enough, a downhill conveyor that is fully loaded will tend to naturally accelerate due to gravity (called ‘regenerative’ action), and therefore must have brakes applied during deceleration and held whenever it is not in operation. This natural acceleration can be used to generate electricity for the local grid while the conveyor is running, via a regenerative variable frequency drive (VFD).

Operational uptime The parallel stacking systems at Ras Al Khair in Saudi Arabia are used alternately to stack dry phosphogypsum tailings to provide full redundancy at all times

In simple terms: more tonnes per hour mean more money per hour; however, this means that for the largest processing facilities, any downtime results in more lost revenue. Design criteria from these clients will often necessarily include a minimum for operational uptime of a new conveying system. These criteria sometimes compel alternate paths for material and even hot-standby operations.

At the Ras Al Khair phosphate facility

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in the removal of phospho-gypsum waste from the plant would cause acid production stoppages.

TNT supplied a system for conveying and stacking this waste that provides full redundancy at nearly all times: the filter press discharges onto an overland conveying network that can feed either of two parallel mobile stacking systems.

The standby system runs in a slow mode until a planned or unplanned shutdown occurs, at which time it is ramped up to full speed and material is immediately diverted to it.

This concept is useful for any bulk material handling that cannot be interrupted, such as stacking a concentrator’s dry tailings, or a mine’s overburden.

Managing financial risk

in Saudi Arabia, for example, the phosphoric acid plant was designed to operate continuously. Any interruptions

While the design complexity of a conveying system is similar to that of a process plant, one major difference is in pricing structures. Process plant design is typically sold as an engineering service and billed on a time and materials basis.

Conveyors are normally sold as single pieces of equipment at a pre-negoti-

ated price that covers design/supply or design/build.

A conveying system is sold for the price that was quoted in advance, and any customisations per the client’s specifications must be identified by the designer/supplier before setting the price. Any changes afterward require a written change order.

This pricing structure transfers the financial risks associated with schedule overruns from the client to the conveyor supplier. The supplier’s design team must account for the major design consideration that results from this commercial requirement.

This shift in financial risk can be addressed by basing the design of a new conveying system project on a standard design, or one used on a very similar previous project.

Modifications and customisations are made as needed during detail engineering. Designing in this way allows the supplier to set, and meet, demanding schedules, incorporate engineering designs that work, and use fast-reacting project teams that can bring each project in on time and within budget.

31

“While the design complexity of a conveying system is similar to that of a process plant, one major difference is in pricing structures”

Brian Evans is a technical writer and Grant Graber is director of project development at Terra Nova Technologies. See: www.tntinc.com



Modular design and fabrication costs a little more up front, but has big paybacks at remote sites by speeding construction times, improving safety and reducing overall costs.

At FMG’s Solomon Mine in NW Australia, TNT delivered, installed and commissioned 16km of overland conveyor systems in record time.

This is another example of utilizing the latest in technologies to improve the project’s ROI. Contact TNT for all your Material Handling needs.

TNT

TERRA NOVA TECHNOLOGIES, INC. San Diego, Boise, Perth, Vancouver, Santiago www.tntinc.com

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Open-pit mining

33

Sifting through the facts Sean Donaghy provides tips and tricks for selecting the right mobile screener

P

ortable screening plants are a major part of the business for aggregate producers and contractors in mining and quarrying operations. However, what is right for one operator may not fit the bill for the next. And, while it seems the only thing separating one mobile screener from another is the colour and a logo, there are a multitude of factors to sift through, from small, highly customised design modifications to the overall type and size.

With new technologies and the development of advanced screen media, operators need to do their research and take advantage of the ever-growing options and choices.

Selecting the right screener takes time, research and a clear idea of the goals of the operation. The first step in the process is to consider whether the company’s production has been maxed out or will continue to grow.

Size it up Understanding the application, materials and desired production is crucial. With plenty of research and consideration of desired production, size and abrasiveness of material and the number of end-size products, an operator can find well-outfitted screens that align with the goals of the operation.

Keep the company’s goals in mind during the selection process. Calculate projected sales for a year and break the number down to tonnages per month.

For example, if a company can sell 750,000t/y, its screens need to sort 62,500t/mth. If the screen is in operation three days per week, eight hours per day, then the operation will require a machine capable of screening around 600t/h.

In this example, a screener that processes 300t/h limits profits and caps the company’s growth potential, while a machine with a potential output of 900t/h will probably come with extra expenses but no added value.

Also keep in mind the end product.

The majority of machines are twodeck screens capable of sorting two sizes of products and an oversize product. Others feature three deck screens that produce an additional sized product.

It is worth remembering that screen boxes vary in size and design, and some screener/scalpers will be labelled ‘high energy’. A high-energy screen box runs faster and produces a higher stroke than a standard screen box.

Many customers notice that the more efficient, lively stroke boosts a machine’s output and produces a cleaner product than a standard screen box. Be on the lookout for these standout features.

Scalp or screen There are two main types of screeners: scalpers and standard screens. Standard screens have a tipping grid or livehead over the feed hopper to stop large material from going into the hopper. The feeder belt speed can also be adjusted to help produce a clean finished product. These screens are at home in sand and gravel pits or quarries, as they are often considered ‘finishing screens’ because they are capable of producing specific sized end products.

A scalping screening plant feeds material directly onto a screen as it comes out of the hopper, which eliminates blockages due to oversized or contaminated material. Scalpers are designed to handle much larger, heavier material in larger crushing operations or for producing gabion stone in a quarry.

They are versatile, but are not ideal for creating a smaller finished product. In fact, scalpers are commonly used to process scrap metals, separate

Standard screens are designed to produce a clean, sized finished product. These screens do the best work in sand and gravel pits, quarries and recycledconcrete and asphalt jobs

Far left: the optional apron feeder, a belt made of metal, is for operators working with metal, large rock or any abrasive material Near left: the standard belt feeder is perfect for sand and gravel operations. It is cost-efficient and will hold up well in numerous applications

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.com

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FEATURE NAME Open-pit mining

Punch plates are essentially a piece of sheet metal with spaced holes for heavier applications.

Punch plates are durable, customisable and affordable.

“Purchasing the wrong screen can slow production and result in revenue losses”

recyclables at slag dumps and extract rock from dirt on construction sites.

Afterward, operators pull in a standard screen to perform the meticulous work.

Hopper size The style of screener is not the only factor one must consider. The industry standard hopper is 3.6m (12ft) wide with an option to upgrade to a 4.2m (14ft)-wide hopper. Very few manufacturers offer a 4.2m hopper as standard, but the wider the hopper, the easier it is to feed the machine. Just an extra 50cm can capture more product and prevent spillage.

The size becomes most pertinent when pairing the screener with the loading machine. For example, excavators or equipment with a narrow bucket are ideal for loading a 3.6m hopper, but a 4.2m hopper is wide enough to accommodate a wheel loader bucket, which can hold twice as much as an excavator bucket. The extra loading space makes a huge difference.

Livehead and tipping grid Operators can add a livehead or tipping grid to a screener above the hopper. A tipping grid is good for preventing larger materials from travelling into the

hopper and through the screener. This hinged grid catches larger materials, and operators can clear them by tipping the grid via a remote control. Although this is an affordable option, it can become a chore, particularly in wet applications where the grid may become plugged frequently.

The other option, a livehead, is essentially a vibrating screen that attaches to the hopper. This is ideal for heavy-duty, wet and sticky applications.

The unit can be used for two purposes: to scalp dirty material off and eliminate the need for manual cleaning, or to size material going into the machine so that operators can produce an additional sized product.

Although these units are designed to boost production and create an additional product, they become a hindrance if used in the wrong application. They are built with thick bars that limit the open area, so operations processing finer materials might discover material on the ground that should be in the hopper.

Apron or belt feeder From the hopper, material is fed onto a standard belt feeder. The belt feeder is perfect for sand and gravel operations.

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It is cost-efficient and will hold up well in numerous applications. However, for operators working with metal, large rock or any abrasive material, a belt feeder is likely to tear or break.

Heavy-duty applications require an apron feeder, which is essentially a belt made of metal. An apron feeder can handle nearly anything an operator throws at it, and that makes the entire machine much more versatile.

Most screens feature a typical wire-mesh media for different sizing applications. However, operations working with abrasive materials may want to consider stainless steel as an alternative. Although the cost is nearly twice as much, stainless steel offers a higher wear resistance and longer life that is worth the extra cost.

Punch plates are another option.

These are essentially a piece of sheet

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Open-pit mining

metal with spaced holes for heavier applications.

reduce wear life when large materials are being processed. Rollers commonly break under pressure and belts can become punctured. As an alternative, some manufacturers offer an impact or sleigh-bed conveyor. These provide more support and can handle heavier products.

The impact bed is solid and runs the width of the conveyor to spread material impact and prevent belt damage.

Most discharge conveyors are 1.2m in width. However, because the screen is wide and gets funnelled down to the conveyor, machines with smaller conveyors can create a bottleneck effect.

The material begins blinding in the corners, narrowing the opening.

This creates productivity and maintenance problems, forcing operators to shut down and clean out the machine. Look for a machine that has less (or no) restriction as it transitions onto the discharge belt. A free-flowing machine with a low drop height is the best option to minimise wear and keep productivity elevated.

Conveyors

Machine design & support

Conveyors commonly incorporate rollers, which are hot spots for damage and

More robust machines often offer features that boost convenience and

productivity, such as larger access areas.

Double-panelled engine compartments allow mechanics more space when performing services, and dual-fuel nozzles provide fuelling access from both sides of the machine.

Some manufacturers build units with access to the engine from both sides as well.

The availability of wear parts and service can make or break an operation’s numbers for any given month. Choose a manufacturer with a good reputation not only for quality equipment and durable components, but also for exceptional customer service.

Some companies offer 24h online parts look-up and ordering with live service support to help keep operations on track. Every manufacturer should also provide a one-year, 1,000h warranty. If not, let it serve as a warning.

Purchasing the wrong screen can slow production and result in revenue losses. Taking the time now to sift through the facts and separate the good from the bad will prevent downtime and loss of production later.

35

“While it seems the only thing separating one mobile screener from another is the colour and a logo, there are a multitude of factors to sift through”

Sean Donaghy is the national sales manager at IROCK Crushers. See: www.irockcrushers.com

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open-pit mining

leaking hoses, lines and their connectors has been around for as long as hydraulic systems themselves. However, with higher system pressures and the need for greater health and safety diligence, it is imperative that attention be given to this aspect of operations.

Evidence of a spill in the sand

Hydraulic failures

Messy business Turlough Guerin discusses the cause and management of spills in mining operations

T

here are numerous federal and state laws that govern the regulation of spills from infrastructure, equipment and plant. Consent conditions, which define the environmental guidelines to which construction and mining projects must comply with as part of approval, also define spills as specific environmental impacts that must be prevented and, if they occur, managed.

Given that more than 50% of all construction environmental incidents in Australia are fluid spills from plant equipment, spills can be a significant challenge for meeting compliance requirements. Additionally, spills from plant and equipment present a safety hazard and reduce uptime and productivity.

and that excludes all the other sources of plant fluid losses. Imagine almost two million drums each containing 205L (or 44 gallons) poured out on the ground or in waterways. If you find it hard to visualise these quantities, it is equivalent to the volume of Cologne’s beer production at its peak, or enough to fill 150 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Even a minor leak of one drop per second will empty almost all of the contents of one of these drums over 24 months. Apart from the downtime and productivity losses that will be created, the safety and environmental ramifications should be of concern to project managers and mining operators alike.

Sealing technologies in hydraulic systems have advanced considerably over the past 30 years, but so too have hydraulic system operating pressures and response times. The problem of

“More than 50% of all construction environmental Mounting pressures incidents in More than 370 million litres of oil leak Australia from hydraulic equipment every year are fluid Table 1: estimate of costs of a 1,000L fluid spill Cost Element Description Value ($A) spills from Loss of product 1,000L of high-quality lubricant 5,000 plant Time commitment of 60 hours for remediation, investigation 9,600 equipment” environmental engineer

and close-out

Soil clean-up

Operation of a wheel loader (I-2 hour) and supervision/disposal of 10t of contaminated soil

11,000

Root-cause analysis

Preparation, delivery and review

3,000

Interviews

Meeting with all stakeholders involved

640

Engagement of suppliers

Discussions regarding IBC and its history

240

Reporting

Preparation of entire investigation report and presentation to operator

6,500

Administration

Collection of all required documentation, communication of findings

2,000

TOTAL

The key objectives of this study were to describe the distribution of spills across plant and equipment types, sources and root causes of equipment-fluid spills at a large earthworks operation.

The current study describes the nature of fluid-spill incidents occurring from operating more than 300 items of plant, where approximately 400 personnel were employed on a 24/7 operation. Each spill incident was investigated to determine the root cause or causes.

The main product released across all the 86 spill incidents was hydraulic fluid.

Hydraulic fluid was present in 74% of the 86 incidents, diesel in 16% of incidents, engine oil 7% and the remaining 2% comprised degreaser and brake fluid.

The spills were predominantly in the main earthworks area of the site. There were a total of 20 different types of plant and equipment involved in the incidents. Of these, eight types accounted for 80% of the incidents.

These were, in decreasing frequency of involvement: loaders, excavators, haul trucks, a surface miner, water carts (i.e. trucks), graders, dozers and a drill rig.

Loaders and excavators were the most likely items of plant to be involved in spill incidents, accounting for approximately 40%.

Of the 14 root-cause descriptions ascribed to all 86 events, four could explain 60% of the spill incidents. These root causes were typically associated with failure of parts in the hydraulic system such as connectors and O-rings.

These findings suggest that at least a portion of the spill incidents could be readily controlled or reduced. For example, the cause ‘Incorrect procedures followed’ can be addressed by increasing the effectiveness of training, particularly in the use and handling of heavy equipment, and the cause ‘Impact with an object’ can also be reduced by targeting safer handling and use of the heavy equipment.

Counting the costs

37,980

Construction and mining in remote locations requires a flexible and yet secure logistics system for the delivery of fuel, oil and chemicals. Intermediate bulk

November 2014 Open-pit_Spills_MM1411.indd 36

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38

open-pit mining

Failure caused by hose twisting

container (IBC) units are used to hold various types of liquids including oils, acids and flocculent reagents.

In one of the spills in the current study, a telehandler interacted with an IBC during its unloading from a shipping container, causing it to puncture and spill 1,000L of lubricant.

The clean-up of the contaminated soil and commitment of time by the contractor’s environmental engineer were the single largest cost items from

the spill incident. It involved the deployment of earthmoving equipment away from the project, and removal and disposal of the contamination.

This cursory analysis does not attempt to quantify the lost productivity from equipment and machinery downtime, which would probably bring the spill costs to more than

A$50,000 (US$45,000).

Getting support from upper management, operators and vendors is key for those teams responsible for health, safety and the environment, and plant and equipment maintenance and performance. It is through these stakeholders that the lessons learnt from this study will be applied.

Table 2: lessons learnt Issue

Applying the learning

Failed hoses and hose fittings are a major source of spills

Improve the quality and focus of machine pre-start inspections.

Anticipate heavy vehicle types and applications where spills are likely to be most prevalent, including excavators, loaders and haul/water trucks.

Enhance communication

Ensure operators of plant are informed of all spills during return-to-work briefings, pre-starts and toolbox talks.

Advise heavy-vehicle and equipment vendors of areas and components where common leaks and spills arise.

Recommendations for adoption

Engage heavy-vehicle and equipment vendors on spillreduction initiatives and spill-prevention strategies.

Introduce KPIs to focus on leaks, seeps and weeps (not reporting spills only).

Regulatory bodies to drive pollution prevention and environmental protection licences that legislate preventative actions.

Turlough Guerin is a professional environmental manager. His career has spanned soil and groundwater assessment and remediation for Rio Tinto and Shell, contractor compliance and assurance management for Chevron, managing sustainability portfolios for Telstra and also Motorola, and engineering consulting to Levine Frick Recon, ICF Kaiser Engineers and Thiess.

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SNAPSHOT

Star light, star bright A Eurocopter AS350 geophysical survey helicopter is pictured illuminated by the Aurora Borealis at McEvoy Lake in Yukon, Canada.

Precision GeoSurveys of Vancouver, Canada has equipped the helicopter with high-resolution magnetic and radiometric sensors to help map lithology, structure, and alteration on a gold prospect near Finlayson Lake in Yukon.

Photo: Erik Keyser

November 2014 snapshot_MM1411.indd 40

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42

BULK HANDLING

Rail overload, coal underload

Growing congestion on US railroads due to crude-oil shipments is side-lining coal and worrying power producers nationwide. Lee Buchsbaum reports on the current situation

W A Union Pacific shunting locomotive Photo: Bloomberg News

inter could become a lot colder in the US if power plants continue to run short of coal and scale back on generation.

The rapid growth in shipments of crude oil by rail as well as heavy agricultural traffic and a resurgent economy are taxing the ability of the nation’s railroads to transport and deliver substantial volumes of coal (the railroads’ number-one commodity), and this is creating a shortage at an increasing number

of power plants across the country.

According to a recent SNL Energy report, coal deliveries are down sharply nationwide, especially throughout the upper Midwest, causing escalating fears among all power generators. It states that in the first half of 2014, Powder River Basin (PRB) coal deliveries to the region dropped a total of 580,000t (640,227 short tons) compared with a year ago despite a brutal 2013-14 winter. In the March

quarter of 2014, PRB coal deliveries declined nearly 2%, or 306,000t compared with 2013, and deliveries since are barely making a dent in the year-on-year deficit.

Preventing a total calamity, according to the report, was the June quarter of 2014, which saw net generation by those same units decline 6%, or 2,515GWh, compared with the June quarter of 2013. However, a mild summer and less air-conditioning saved

November 2014 Bulk_MM1411.indd 42

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Bulk handling

Train cars filled with coal sit on the railroad tracks near St Louis, Missouri Photo: Bloomberg News

Bulk_MM1411.indd 44

utilities from running out of coal.

Alarm bells are starting to ring as fears of higher fuel costs and electricity prices for consumers loom ahead of potential outages, even as Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF, which operates one of the largest rail networks in the US) enjoys record

demand and profits in today’s largely deregulated transportation shipping environment.

Coal producers and consumers, rarely pleased with rail service, are clamouring for solutions as their dependency on an ever-taxed rail system only grows. Coal miners are

even more frustrated; they can only watch as more power generators switch to natural gas, not because it is cheaper, but because customers can no longer rely on a steady stream of coal trains dumping on their stockpiles.

Though all parties are aware of the problems, the solutions seem long in coming. With meteorologists predicting another harsh winter, even BNSF seems to be wondering if it can really move the freight.

“The whole system is suffering,” said Terry Whiteside, chairman for the Alliance for Rail Competition, speaking at an early September federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) hearing on rail delays in Fargo, North Dakota. “Rail speeds are falling nationwide and that should be of concern for all producers.”

This is an additional hit for utilities that have switched from more expensive coal to cheaper natural gas, and then, lured by cheaper long-term coal contracts, cycled back to coal.

Now, with quality coal getting harder to find, those same utilities may be forced to either find alternative sources, endure expensive alternate transportation options or even switch back to natural gas. And with ever-increasing anti-coal pressures coming to bear from

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Bulk handling

47

federal regulators and some investors, that switch could be permanent.

Root of the problem Despite inroads by natural gas and renewables, coal-fired power plants still comprise roughly 40% of the US generation fleet, and over 75% of all the coal used to make electricity is transported by rail. However, increasing amounts of missed shipments are forcing utilities to burn through ever-diminishing stockpiles heading into winter.

Hardest hit are those power plants dependent on coal coming out of Montana and Wyoming’s PRB, which supplies over 40% of US power producers. Though most of the region’s mines are served by both Union Pacific (UP) and BNSF railroads, the majority of the roughly 360Mt shipped each year from the PRB is handled by BNSF. Just next door to the PRB, BNSF is simultaneously enjoying a boom in crude-oil traffic from North Dakota’s burgeoning Bakken oilfield. Crude-oil volumes in recent years have surged from a few thousand car loads to over 400,000 last year and traffic levels are growing exponentially, especially along the BNSF network.

Choked to capacity, overall traffic is getting slower. For power plants, many of which have not fully recovered their stockpiles from last year’s polar vortex, coal reserves are actually dwindling instead of growing as they head into the autumn and winter.

Coal-train traffic normally increases during the summer months as power plants stockpile ahead of winter drawdowns. But this year, despite decent weather, shipments have been so poor and erratic that utilities have not received the service they require.

Major utilities such as Xcel are concerned that this autumn’s large grain harvest will prove to be an additional challenge for BNSF, and “we will be unable to restore our inventories to more normal levels, causing us to enter winter with unsafe levels of coal inventories”, the company testified to the STB. The cause of the congestion, explained George Duggan, group vice-president of coal for BNSF, has been the tremendous overall demand placed on all North American railroads while the US economy emerged out of recession, and increased consumer activity placed more cars and commodities on the rails. Though the entire railroad industry grew by over 800,000 units during this time,

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according to Duggan, 436,000 of those units can be attributed to BNSF. Of all the commodities shipped by the company, coal is still number one at 2.2 million units, or 22% of total goods hauled in 2013. Oil shipments, though up 229% since 2006 and increasing rapidly, represent “less than 5% of all the units we handle”, said Duggan at this autumn’s gathering of the National Coal Transportation Association in Denver, Colorado.

Ironically, he later characterised the same fracked oil – which is currently side-tracking coal shipments – as “a growth opportunity that will one day ensure energy independence for the US”, in front of a gathering of worried utility and coal executives who rightly feel tasked with ensuring American energy security and continuity in the here and now. Duggan’s frustrating presentation, coming shortly after the

STB hearings about spreading concern over system reliability, mollified very few in the audience.

Overall, utility stockpiles have fallen to their lowest levels since the end of the Joint Line outage in March 2006.

The dual derailments that severed the Joint Line that year led utilities to reconsider all sorts of fuel switches, and drove both UP and BNSF to make major reinvestments in their lines to ensure smooth transit of previously increasing rail volumes. However, after almost a decade of triple- and even quadruple-tracking some segments of this key rail corridor, the overall system seems less fluid today.

Unsafe inventory levels Captive to BNSF, Xcel publicly castigated the company over its continued “poor railroad performance” at the Sherco generating facility in

A Union Pacific coal train

“That can only be described as horrific service, if it can be described as service at all” A bulldozer moves coal at Foresight Energy’s Pond Creek mine in Illinois

November 2014 10/10/2014 10:24

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Bulk handling

A BNSF train pulls through the mountains

Minnesota. Sherco burns up to three train loads or 27,000t of coal every day, and supplies 24% of the power needed

by Xcel’s upper Midwest customers.

Tom Imbler, Denver-based vice-president of commercial operations for Xcel, related that Sherco’s output is being dialled back at night as it purchases

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replacement power off the grid. Since April, the crisis has expanded to include several other Xcel stations in Colorado and Texas, namely the 1,410MW Comanche station in Colorado and the 1,067MW Tolk and 1,018MW Harrington plants in Texas, Xcel reported recently.

“BNSF has been delivering approximately 65% of our monthly nominations for these facilities, and cycle times have increased an average of 48% for our Texas-bound trains and 67% for our Colorado-bound trains. To put this in perspective, since July 1, our Texas inventories have declined by nearly 460,000t, and our Colorado inventories at the impacted station have declined by 570,000t,” said Imbler.

In Texas, Texas Utilities (TUCO) described its rail service as extremely poor. From January to March 2014, TUCO’s cycle times for rail sets dumping at the plant, returning to the PRB, loading and then returning to TUCO were 124% of expected historical values.

Since the April STB hearing, TUCO has experienced growing deterioration.

“Average cycle times for August were 170% of expected historical values,” the company said. From January to August, TUCO wrote that it nominated 5.3Mt of PRB coal. “During that same eight-month period, TUCO received only 3.8Mt, a shortfall of 1.5Mt. That is 14,300 rail cars considered past due,” it added.

Mark Adkins, vice-president for

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Bulk handling

51

NextGen Coal Services, said BNSF had routinely left his company’s cars sitting around, without the crews and locomotives required to get coal to the electric plants that hire his company to get it there.

Train cars owned by NextGen and contracted to be pulled by BNSF have sat idle for as long as nine days, Adkins told the board commissioners. “That can only be described as horrific service, if it can be described as service at all,” Adkins stated. “And there was no voicemail, no email, no text message.”

BNSF’s solutions “We want to haul as much coal as you want us to haul. Our job is to get you as much coal as we can,” defended Duggan to the NCTA audience. Though in 2013, BNSF moved more coal “than all of the utility industry asked us to handle, some of my colleagues in the mining industry believe we have not been able to meet that demand [this year]. And that is absolutely true,” he admitted.

In response to growing demand, “we’ve added well over 150 coal sets in the last 18 months. But they are not moving as fast as they need to. We are working to make that different by increasing overall train velocity,” Duggan said.

However, somewhat counter-intuitively, having additional sets in service does not mean power plants will get more coal, Duggan explained. In fact, average days of stockpiled burn are down from almost 80 days in January 2012 to 40 days by September 2014, and coal sets in service have surged during this time.

At the beginning of 2013 there were 335 coal sets in service on the BNSF network. That number jumped to over 450 that summer, and increased to 484 by the end of August 2014.

As of August, BNSF’s growth in coal traffic for the year to date over 2013 was 22,183 units, compared with a growth of 47,157 units of crude. The additional volumes have resulted in slower train velocities across the system. Agricultural shipments have slowed 22%, crude 24% and coal 17%.

BNSF’s management is very aware of the challenges the company is facing.

With a looming threat of re-regulation being bandied about by angry congressmen, legislators and customers, the railroad has spent close to US$50 billion since 2000 on capital expenditure, including US$4 billion in 2013 and an additional US$5 billion this year.

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Almost all of that has been spent on purchasing new locomotives and cars, installing more track and hiring and training more employees; BNSF hired 4,000 new workers last year and hopes to bring on another 5,000 this year. The 500 new locomotives that BNSF is receiving this year represent a US$1.1 billion investment.

“If any of these shippers had just one more option that they could consider, I believe that we wouldn’t be hearing so much about substandard service levels,” testified Minnesota senator Al Franken to the STB. “In a competitive market, railroads wouldn’t be able to de-prioritise certain shippers the way they can now.” There were 26 Class I rail companies in 1980; now, four corporations control more than 90% of the US market.

Though BNSF promised that it will not let any producer run out of coal, it has resisted creating a timeline for getting back to normal.

“We will continue to work with you to deliver as much coal as we possibly

can. The economics of power dispatch is your company’s business. What you can rely on us for is to get as much coal to you as we can,” said Duggan.

“Month by month we are moving more coal out of the PRB into your facilities. It may not as much as you want. It may not be as fast as you want.

It may not be rebuilding your stockpiles as fast as you want, but we are moving a lot of coal,” closed Duggan.

Kathy Benham, director of fuel strategies and sourcing for Minnesota Power, asked him afterwards when things might get back to normal, “or even what the new normal for coal shipments is?”

Duggan’s response was anything but comforting: “Normal is different to different people,” he said. “If the question is: when are we going to rebuild coal stockpiles to all 135 utilities we serve? Well, that’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s going to happen place by place, one step at a time. We’re working through your demand as we figure that out.”

A Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train Photo: Bloomberg News

“In a competitive market, railroads wouldn’t be able to de-prioritise certain shippers the way they can now”

Trucks at one of Peabody Energy’s Powder River Basin mines

November 2014 10/10/2014 10:24

52

Industrial minerals

‘Salt’ project T takes different shape

Richard Roberts reports on progress at South Boulder Mines’ Colluli potash project in Eritrea

he emerging Colluli potash project has some key hurdles in front of it from an investment standpoint, and particularly for its publicly listed half-owner, South Boulder Mines (SBM). But the mining world is now getting a more favourable technical view of a project that shapes as an important entrée to the world-class Danakil basin mineral province.

Eritrea in east Africa has one operating mine, a second that should be in production next year, and a third in the latter stages of feasibility work.

Drilling at South Boulder Mines’ Colluli potash project

SBM is aiming to elevate Colluli to that status by the middle of next year, when a definitive feasibility study should be completed.

Managing director Paul Donaldson is positive about Eritrea’s nascent mining sector, and not just because SBM’s equal partner in Colluli is the Eritrean government. He sees an emerging African nation with a stable mineral law regime and government; good climate; and encouraging foreign-investment environment.

Last month’s Asmara Mining Conference 2014 in the country’s capital, at which Donaldson spoke, had more than 300 delegates in another sign of rising international interest in Eritrea’s mineral potential.

Colluli, 75km from the Red Sea in mid-southern Eritrea, is estimated to host more than 1 billion tonnes of potassium-bearing salts – all suitable for the production of potash fertilisers – with the shallow mineralisation (down to 140m or so) supportive of open-cut mining.

Apart from having economic advantages over the underground mining methods commonly used to extract the world’s potash, there is the relative simplicity from a mining standpoint, which is a positive in a country that needs to nurture a mining skills base.

Donaldson highlighted the resource-recovery advantages that the extraction method has over most forms of underground potash mining. SBM has also managed to dramatically scale back the open-pit strip ratio once projected for Colluli over the past 12 months, among a series of key results from work that has put the venture on a different path to development.

Donaldson said the Danakil potash belt, saddling the Eritrea/Ethiopia border, compared favourably, in terms of size, resource depth and environmental issues, with other potash belts globally, with more than 4.2 billion tonnes of measured and indicated potassium salts identified across the Danakil to date.

While equity investors continue to frown on the structure of the jointventure deal SBM that did with the government before former BHP executive Donaldson’s arrival – citing its unfavourable funding criteria – there is no doubt that Colluli has emerged in a better technical space on the back of a

November 2014 Ind-min_MM1411.indd 52

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Industrial minerals

Core samples from Colluli

revamped feasibility focus and study-group composition.

“It was a completely different project and the economics didn’t look particularly favourable [back in February 2013],” Donaldson said.

“So we’ve pretty much spent the last year or so disassembling the whole resource and looking at [the question], what is the project? How do you scale it back to mitigate the risks? And how do you make sure you’re getting as much value accretion as possible?

“For a period of time there we were actually questioning whether there is a project here at all. We’re very confident now that there is a compelling story for a long-term project that we can scale back for start-up, and mitigate all of the safety and capital risks, and jurisdictional risks, for people [investors].”

“The original project team was a globally distributed team and it right expertise was sub- The Consolidation and centralisation of the optimal in project group, including external that it consultants brought in to replace the original line-up, sees most of the current didn’t work concentrated in Perth, Western function as Australia, with supplementary activity of Canada. a team, outThere the Saskatchewan Research actually” Council, and consultant Don Larmour,

add internationally renowned metallurgical knowledge and skills to the mix.

“The original project team was a globally distributed team and it was sub-optimal in that it didn’t function as a team, actually,” Donaldson said.

“People were operating in silos, and to get everyone together was quite an expensive exercise.

“I brought as many of the project streams back to Perth as I could. Perth has got so much expertise in mining, I’m not quite sure why we ever went outside of Perth to do this study in the first place.

“The speed that we’ve been pushing

the new pre-feasibility study [PFS] through at has been quite fast, and that’s only achievable by having everybody within a stone’s throw.”

Leading the mining study now (and over the past year) is AMC Consultants.

Standout results of the new work have included lowering the proposed mine strip ratio from 14:1 to 2.3:1, lowering projected production costs from US$224/t to US$75/t of product, simultaneously pushing up the revenue per tonne of product above US$290/t, and blowing out the potential mine life of 17 years to 200 years.

The Asmara conference heard that Colluli was originally envisaged as a potassium chloride producer focusing on the deposit’s sylvinite ore. But the stratification of the Colluli potassium salts means that significant cost benefits can be gained by extracting and processing all salts, reducing the strip ratio, and potentially changing the payback dynamics of the project.

The PFS, begun in April this year, zeroed in on the economics of extracting and producing potassium sulphate, a premium potash fertiliser.

The combination of pure kainite and the potassium chloride at Colluli offers scope not only for the use of simple and proven liberation and flotation processes, but also for tapping the inherent spontaneous chemical-reaction properties of the materials, under normal ambient conditions (particularly favourable in the Eritrean location), to produce potassium sulphate.

“Colluli started as a potassium chloride project, [but] when you look at the combination of salts in the resource, they all come together very nicely to make potassium sulphate with low energy input and high yield, and it’s the combination of salts that does that,” Donaldson said.

“A key differentiator for the project

is the fact that the salts are in solid form from the outset. Everybody else has to evaporate to get to these salts; they make what’s called a harvest salt, and effectively they start with about 5kg of potassium per tonne of water, then evaporate the water out.

“The whole Danakil basin in Eritrea and Ethiopia is the only resource left now for these particular salts in solid form. There are only three areas in the world where it appears in appreciable amounts: Ukraine, where mining has stopped; Sicily, where mining has stopped; and then the Danakil basin, which is unexploited. The salts in solid form are a big plus.”

He continued: “In terms of information that is in the public domain, this is the biggest potassium sulphate resource out there. There’s over 200Mt of potassium sulphate in this resource, and the next closest is about 40Mt. The local operating environment in the Danakil basin with its low annual rainfall, high temperatures and high winds is also conducive to solar evaporation, and the mine is able to leverage those factors to improve recoveries as well.

“We’ve got a continuous uninterrupted supply of water because we’re pulling it effectively from the Red Sea, 75km away. So our process is not sensitive to water quality and we’re 110m below sea level. We can pretty much feed water under gravity and we’re not pulling huge volumes out of the aquifers, which has got potential environmental impact,” explained Donaldson.

Best laid plans Colluli was originally planned as a far bigger project, in an era when that was the prevailing industry mantra. While SBM’s feasibility study is ongoing, the

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.com 10/10/2014 10:27

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Industrial minerals

“For a company that doesn’t have a revenue stream set up, I’m definitely not in the big-is-better camp”

Ind-min_MM1411.indd 56

impact of scaling down, lowering capital costs and start-up risks, and effectively templating all aspects of a 350,000t/y venture (including entry into end-use markets) in a start-up environment before enlargement, will make sense to debt providers and equity partners alike.

“For a company that doesn’t have a revenue stream set up, I’m definitely not in the big-is-better camp,” Donaldson said.

“In fact, when people think bigger is better, it means the only way they can justify the economics is through scale and volume. If you’ve got a project that doesn’t need that to get up and away, happy days, because you can mitigate a lot of the risk.

“Even the government asked us: if you had US$1 billion, would you develop it the same way? I’ve always said yes, because I don’t want to start an operation with a workforce of more than 500, and I don’t want to have the commercial and capital-risk exposure with a greenfield development.

“The more risk you can mitigate up front, especially when you’ve got a long-term project, the better, and then there is the added benefit of doing process optimisation. I think there are a

lot of benefits in taking a modular approach.”

Donaldson said that while the economic justification for the project would initially be built around the potash resource (“we’re very focused on getting the project to stand on its own two legs with potash”, he said), there are also “huge volumes of high-quality rock salt and magnesium chloride, and those products have got established markets”.

For Colluli, these will come into the market eventually because of the project’s proximity to the coast and the low-cost logistics involved.

Next steps SBM is aiming to finish its PFS by February 2015 and is currently wrapping up related drilling. It has finalised PFS-level process design.

“We’ve got A$10 million [US$8.8 million] in the bank and that’s more than enough to finish off the PFS,” Donaldson said.

A parallel drilling programme to feed further information into the definitive feasibility study (DFS) is also progressing. “Really, the PFS for us is an exercise to derive the start-up of the

project with a reasonably high level of confidence so that we can take that module size directly into DFS,” Donaldson said.

“We will pilot certain parts of the process; effectively crushing, flotation and mixing. They’re all well understood mineral-processing techniques, and so the scale-up is a low risk, but there is a set of brine recovery ponds as part of this process as well.

“We do want to do some pilot work on the brine-recovery circuit, and some work on a couple of the salts that are formed in the process just to make sure that the residence times are properly calculated for the final process.

“So the DFS should be finished about June next year and we think we’re going to need another A$3 million or thereabout to finish it off. It’s absolutely essential to get the design right.”

Donaldson concludes: “We want to be able to go immediately from DFS into the detailed engineering design for the processing plant, so we want to make sure we’ve got enough cash to keep the momentum up on the project while we’re going through and raising funds for the bigger development.”

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From mine to market

Business-management software is growing in importance as mining companies look to streamline their operations and gain a competitive advantage. MM reviews some important market developments

Integration remains challenge for miners

R

educing access barriers to data and information will open up “worlds of opportunity for a mining company”, according to Jay Jenkins, senior manager in Ventyx’s intelligent mining solutions team. Jenkins believes more agile mining companies – aided by modern IT – will gain real competitive advantages in the future.

“Only with better operational and organisational transparency and visibility would one have the agility to be more responsive to demand signals from the market,” he said in a recent interview with Mining Magazine.

“Updating mine and production plans in reaction to changing marketing conditions is difficult, whereas having real-time visibility into current material inventories and movements through the value chain, as well as production schedules over various time horizons in a single collaborative environment, is the first step towards production agility.”

Breaking down and/or integrating silos remains a key to achieving desired levels of business agility.

Asked how the industry was faring in its efforts to leverage operational data to achieve better financial results, Jenkins said there were encouraging signs.

But about half the respondents to an annual mining IT survey by Ventyx represented mining companies with little or no data integration across value chains. Of all the companies surveyed, 19% were in Stage I with information in silos across the company, or Stage II (32%) with information stored in disparate spreadsheets relying on human intelligence to take the information, analyse it, and plan action steps.

There is an increased awareness of the benefits of information technology/ operational technology (IT/OT) integration, according to Jenkins, who also pointed out that companies are increasingly investigating more applications.

“Rather than using IT/OT only for a strategy around asset management or remote management of assets, more people see it providing production efficiency and impacting operational strategies,” he explained.

A third (31%) of companies surveyed

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showed convergence and were in Stage IV (20%) with a consolidated view of production systems and the value chain, or Stage V (11%), with the ability to view information in real-time and adjust operations across the value chain. Half of the companies had also adopted a remote mining strategy.

A total of 247 respondents were surveyed and interviews were completed in July, with all respondents having a job title of manager or above. Middle management made up two thirds of respondents, and senior management about a quarter.

Key trends At the start, respondents addressed the key trends shaping the mining industry.

Most prominent, with a fifth of responses, were the economics pushing the mining industry, competition within the industry and demand for mined commodities.

Second, with 17% mentioned, were general costs, operating/production costs, cost management and reduction, and the imperatives to lower costs and increase production. Factors seen as the primary drivers shaping priorities and operations were: • E nergy costs and efficiency (68%); • C hanging government regulation (59%);

• F luctuations in commodities (55%); and • E nvironmentalists (44%).

“The leading benefit of IT/OT data integration is optimising for cost and efficiency,” Ventyx reported. The second benefit was incorporating real-time data for improved decision-making.

Jenkins said that automation is a factor in increased IT system integration and convergence in mining, and would lead to improved profitability. “The Aitik mine in Sweden has a head grade of about 0.2% copper (a quarter of the figure at other major copper mines), yet it is competitive and profitable due to investments in automation,” he said.

“The reason this is interesting is that it’s something of a ‘ghost of Christmas future’ regarding the trend of declining grades of orebodies in the future, and a great example of how automation and technology can affect competitiveness.

“When you begin to combine these technologies is when you see good returns. IT/OT convergence enables a combination of automation and operational intelligence, leading to intelligent automation. Combining mobility with operational intelligence and analytics can bring tasks, lists or alerts to a user automatically so that issues are resolved quickly.”

Control room at the Boliden Aitik copper mine in Sweden

“Only with better operational and organisational transparency and visibility would one have the agility to be more responsive to demand signals from the market”

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Software Ready for growth Jenkins added that market conditions are tough, but in such a cyclical industry it is clear that those who invest in technology are going to be better positioned to take advantage of the inevitable up-swing in mining, which will act as a multiplier on returns.

He also said that remote operations centres, such as those operated by BHP

Billiton and Rio Tinto in Australia, were another driver. “By bringing everybody together in a room, even if you still have a way to go in the underlying technology, there is still a lot of benefit to having an integrated, cross supply-chain interactive engagement,” he explained.

“Rio Tinto’s remote monitoring facility set up in Brisbane to monitor and analyse processing data from mines in

Australia, Mongolia and the US is a great step towards connected mining, especially with respect to collaboration.

Remote operating centres allow experts to leverage knowledge and experience over multiple geographic areas in a more timely fashion. According to the newspaper The Australian, Rio Tinto saved A$90 million [US$78 million] using these analysis techniques.”

Leaders maintain vibrant sales outlook A computer data centre

“It is noteworthy that none of the suppliers witnessed a reduction in revenue, which points toward a healthier enterprise market in 2014”

Researcher ARC Advisory Group says the worldwide enterprise-software market continued its year-on-year (yoy) growth in the June quarter of 2014, helped by a 5% appreciation in the euro vis-à-vis the US dollar from June 2013 to June 2014.

Suppliers included in ARC’s latest market review recorded combined quarterly revenue of US$24.4 billion, a 4.7% yoy growth rate.

“The year-over-year change in supplier revenues ranged from flat to growth of 30%,” the researcher says. “It is noteworthy that none of the suppliers witnessed a reduction in revenue, which points toward a healthier enterprise market in 2014.”

SAP, which has just staged its 2014 Mining and Metals Forum in Darmstadt, Germany, recently reported 2014 first-half (to June 30) revenue of €7,849 million (US$9.8 billion), up 2.4% yoy, and maintains that it is on track to exceed last year’s €16.8 billion revenue.

The company, the world’s biggest supplier of business software to mining/ resources companies, is aiming to exceed €22 billion of revenue within 3-4 years.

While companies in few other sectors are contending with the layers of IT complexity that miners are, they also appear to be entering a new era of business-model innovation, made possible by the convergence of cloud, mobile, social and in-memory technologies.

“Emerging markets will continue to be a growth driver, with high growth in software and cloud revenues expected through 2017,” SAP says. “In addition to our investments in China, Russia and the Middle East, we are expanding our investments in Africa. Overall, we expect to have sufficient future growth to reach our 2014 outlook targets and medium-term aspirations, which extend to 2017.”

US market-research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) says it expects the global IT market to expand 4.1% in 2014, outpacing overall economic

growth, with the software segment tipped to grow by 6.1%.

Software and hardware demand to support advanced business analytics platforms continues to be a driver for SAP and other major IT vendors.

IT researcher Gartner says the software market for business intelligence (BI), analytics and corporate performance management grew by 14.1% in 2013 following two years of strong growth in 2011-12.

The market was expected to sustain robust growth “as BI and analytics are rated No.1 priorities in corporate IT”.

SAP, Oracle, SAS, IBM and Microsoft continue to dominate the global BI software market.

Supporting ARC’s robust growth message, Oracle Corp last month reported its fiscal 2015 March quarter revenues were up 3% yoy to US$8.6 billion. “We are increasing our cloud-services growth rate while simultaneously delivering record levels of cash flow,” says Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “We're off to a good start in 2015.”

EMC Corp said its record 2014 (calendar/fiscal year) June-quarter revenue of US$5.9 billion was up 5% yoy. CEO Joe Tucci says the IT industry and its customers are “in the midst of a massively disruptive and transformational shift, and the pace of change is accelerating”.

Picking up on this theme, India-based Wipro says the speed of transformation in the IT world, and broader industry, is creating challenges that were new to many of its natural-resources businesssegment customers. “Consequently, the industry [mining/energy] is now faced with a transformative set of challenges for the future,” the company said.

“In the wake of these changes are several significant shifts prevalent in the industry, [among them] increased demand for end-to-end visibility and control of mine operations and planning, including life-of-mine planning, [operations] execution systems, and management of equipment and other critical resources; and an increasing necessity to embrace and accelerate automated and robotic mining methods.”

Meanwhile, Siemens PLM Software, told analysts at an industry event in the US in September that factory and production systems underpinning the Industrial Internet of Things were reaching new levels of intelligence and autonomy. The emerging digital enterprise will have autonomous production systems with embedded intelligence down to the sensor level.

The German company sees a fundamental shift in process plant and equipment design, with “products that must now be designed for connectivity and intelligence”.

November 2014 Software_MM1411.indd 58

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.com 10/10/2014 10:30

ADVERTISER PROFILE

59

Unearthing implicit modelling: a 10-year journey from pioneer to world leader ARANZ Geo, a recognised world leader in the visualisation and interpretation of geological sciences, is celebrating a decade since the release of the company’s Leapfrog® 3D geological modelling solutions

A

RANZ Geo has an ambitious global highgrowth business plan, following an equally ambitious three-year plan which saw the company’s revenues and customer numbers double year to year. Last month the company announced a significant private equity investment to continue driving and supporting innovation, as it embarks on its second decade in the market.

Leading this charge is ARANZ Geo’s CEO Shaun Maloney: “We’re gearing up to further accelerate global expansion and product delivery as well as looking at strategic acquisition opportunities.”

ARANZ Geo’s R&D Centre and head office is based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with global offices in Australia, Brazil, Chile and Canada.

Sales and support offices are also located in Denmark and South Africa. The company plans to open more offices this year to support continued global expansion.

ARANZ Geo’s genesis can be traced back to ARANZ, a research organisation formed in 1995 to develop and commercialise innovative technologies based on the powerful algorithm it wrote. This algorithm, named FastRBF™, is a superior form of Radial Basis Functions (RBF), an engine that creates surfaces directly from data.

The pioneering technology was first used for medical imaging, with applications later created for the film industry to create 3D characters such as Gollum in Lord of the Rings. FastRBF™ was even used to model an asteroid for NASA. ARANZ Geo’s flagship 3D geological modelling software Leapfrog® was released to the market 10 years ago. The software began as a collaboration between ARANZ and an Australian mining consultancy, SRK, in 2003. Together, they looked at geological modelling in a new way by applying RBF technology (also known as implicit modelling). The result radically sped up the modelling process, making it not only dramatically faster but also dynamic.

Early users became highly passionate ‘leapfroggers’ who took their geological models and the companies that relied on them to new heights. Fuelled by success, demand for Leapfrog grew rapidly. Maloney says: “We were surprised at how quickly the word spread and we grew exponentially to meet that demand.”

In 2010, ARANZ Geo bought out SRK’s shares and continued to innovate and grow the market.

The powerful implicit modelling engine that first set Leapfrog apart sparked a paradigm shift in the industry.

Left: image of a vein system created in Leapfrog Geo. Below left: applying the Leapfrog software

Maloney says: “When we first introduced implicit modelling to geologists, it was a completely different approach. It allowed geologists to build models in hours or days and not weeks.”

Leapfrog has set the standard in geological modelling and is relied on by many of the top mining and exploration firms to reduce risk associated with geological modelling.

“It’s not an add-on solution; it’s a purpose-built implicit modelling tool designed to add significant value,” says Maloney. “The inbuilt workflows and tools are specific to geological modelling and harness the power of Leapfrog’s unrivalled engine.”

A clear goal for ARANZ Geo is to continue to excite geologists and make their jobs and lives easier.

Maloney adds: “We’re very focused on creating real solutions to real problems. We’ll continue to develop Leapfrog and have new solutions in the development pipeline.”

Maloney says interoperability with other market-leading products is the key to future growth. “Our partnering strategy will see us working with companies that are also at the forefront of their respected fields in the mining, geothermal energy and hydrogeology industries.

The focus is on bringing material benefits in speed, efficiency and risk management.”

The message from our clients is very clear, says Maloney: “Slow cumbersome processes that aren’t dynamic are no longer acceptable.

Customers want to be dealing with the most up-to-date information, faster, and integrated end-to-end. That’s what our partnerships and further innovation will deliver.”

As ARANZ Geo ramps up global growth the market can expect to see more thoughtfully designed innovative solutions in the next 10 years.

Leapfrog is sponsoring the publication of ‘Unearthing implicit modelling’ to mark 10 years in the industry. The book is divided into topic areas written by industry experts and will be a source of the latest information on implicit modelling.

Get your free ebook at leapfrog3d.com/ebook

Contact information

ARANZ Geo Head office: 41 Leslie Hills Drive, Riccarton, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand Tel: +64 3 961 1031 Website: www.aranzgeo.com

www.aranzgeo.com

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.com

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Software

Schneider introduces Ampla MES 2014 Schneider Electric held its 2014 Software Global Customer Conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Florida, US Data wires lead to servers Photo: Bloomberg News

Schneider Electric used its 2014 Software Global Customer Conference in Florida, US, to unveil its Plant Operation Ampla MES 2014 integrated planning and optimisation software for the mining industry.

The company also provided an overview of new Avantis, SimSci and Wonderware product lines that were previously part of Invensys, which is now owned by Schneider.

The event heard that Ampla MES 2014 helps optimise mining supply chains while improving productivity by up to 20%. Ampla MES 2014 includes production and inventory accounting, delay accounting, energy management and plan metric conformance.

It is the latest evolution of the company’s MES mining solution and includes advances in inventory management, tracking and work-in-progress visualisation across the mining operation, Schneider said.

Meanwhile, new and updated features of the Avantis enterprise asset-management software are said to extend usability, knowledge management and collaboration for more comprehensive and predictive asset

management. New workflow functionality provides customers with closed-loop work process management, along with escalation and system of record capture of processes, procedures and activities.

A plug-in for Esri’s GIS allows customers to view Avantis.

SimSci Suite 2014 software contains Schneider’s flagship process design, simulation and optimisation offering, including: PRO/II 9.3 with updated sequencing and focused improvements to de-pressuring; DYNSIM 5.2 with enhanced usability and commercialisation of a metals, mining and minerals model library; and ROMeo 6.2, with enhancements to existing informationstream functionality and integration to third-party refinery reactor models.

The Wonderware InTouch 2014 R2 HMI and Wonderware System Platform 2014 R2 SCADA products feature an expanded set of symbols and wizards in situational-awareness libraries, simplifying drag-and-drop informational and HMI displays and reducing engineering time.

Wonderware MES 2014 is said to offer new web-based client and line performance monitoring, as well as

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Pulse change picks up speed Australian enterprise resource planning (ERP) software developer Pulse Mining Systems describes the latest iteration of its Vantage product as a total rework of the platform. Its development and staged release is occurring at a time of similar renewal at the business level.

“In late 2013, a review of Pulse Mining's business structure and model was initiated,” a company spokesperson says.

“During the review period, most

R&D work was halted to enable a smooth transition to the new structure and work systems. While some aspects of our operation continue to be overhauled, an important shift in direction for the Vantage project has now been endorsed.”

The company's new CEO, Mark Spry, says Vantage provides users with an improved web-based user interface while retaining “the same miningfocused business logic and functionality that they currently enjoy. For existing clients this means no additional investment or training and that a smooth transition to the new ERP is assured,” he says.

The new Vantage is also HTML5based, making it compatible with mobile devices and much more intuitive to use.

Spry says the initial project scope included a total rework of the ERP, comprising six overarching modules, about 2,500 sub-programs and modules, and more than nine million lines of code.

“Redeveloped components of the ERP will be rolled out as part of our ongoing release programme, and it

is anticipated that the ERP transformation will be completed in late 2016,” he says.

Spry says this year’s focus is also on developing Pulse’s business-intelligence products and services, and enabling higher levels of integration with other technology packages and fleet-management systems.

Mark Spry, CEO of Pulse Mining Systems (front), with colleagues

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Software

Servers and hard drives at IBM’s data centre in Texas Photo: Bloomberg News

“I think many mining companies are more innovative than companies in other industries, and some of them are early adopters”

Software market down but innovations emerging Mining companies have eased back considerably on IT spending this year in response to softer commodity prices, SAP’s global lead for mining, Ruediger Schroedter, said at the software giant’s biannual Mining and Metals Forum in Darmstadt, Germany.

However, he remains “cautiously optimistic” about the year ahead as the industry’s focus on productivity and asset-sweating intensifies.

Giving a presentation on SAP’s solution road map and innovations for mining at the forum, Schroedter said most of the innovation was around the connected mining enterprise, with significant opportunities still being seen for implementing and leveraging monitoring, business management and analytics benefits from SAP’s HANA platform in the current market, and the internet of things (IoT), which would play a major role in the “digital mine of the future”.

Schroedter said the “top three IoT scenarios” for mining would focus on connected asset management, operational monitoring and businessprocess transformation. There were “concrete benefits” to be had from remote maintenance, which Schroedter expects to be magnified by SAP’s new cloud solution for remote maintenance.

“Everything that helps to reduce operational expenses in a quick way is attractive [to mining companies and contractors] right now,” he said. “Also, the analytics piece and getting visibility into the mines and operational data is becoming more and more popular.

From an IT point of view, simplification is still an important topic.

“The market is not bad at all. We would always like to have more customers and deployments, but there is lots of interest in our new solutions; there are actually lots of projects in which customers are experimenting with new solutions. What you don’t see right now is big or huge projects.

“The bigger projects that are currently running were started 2-3 years ago, and are still going. But this year is not a big one for larger projects. The good idea would be to spend [on IT] through the cycle. I think some are probably doing it, but mostly we see the spending going down right now.

“But I think many mining companies are more innovative than companies in other industries, and some of them are early adopters. There is a lot of interest in predictive maintenance but a different economic environment is

needed for more companies to jump into it.”

The SAP Mining and Metals Forum also heard from Bert Schulze, SAP senior director, customer and partner strategy for cloud solutions, on the company’s cloud strategy for the mining and metals industries. ArcelorMittal Mining chief information officer Herve Legrand spoke on putting the strategy into action under a “mining partnership” with SAP. The company had improved visibility into key performance indicators and speeded reporting with the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation application on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

“The use of cloud solutions and infrastructure is an increasingly important way to support our mining business,” said Legrand. “ArcelorMittal Mining’s IT strategy is to manage all SAP applications from the cloud using SAP HANA. This successful six-month project was the first step; it gave us automated reporting and faster access to high-quality global data, which is helping us to make much faster business decisions.”

According to a recent SAP customer survey, 80% of energy and naturalresources customers plan to move to a cloud or hybrid IT model over the next three years. The ‘industry cloud organisation’ at SAP is said to be working with customers to “combine the best solutions with the right cloud model to solve industry-specific challenges”.

SAP Mining and Metals Forum sessions focused on managing and motivating employees, improving margins and supplier relationships, streamlining common processes to

create new opportunities and gaining visibility across remote mining locations.

ThyssenKrupp recently signed an agreement to use the Ariba Network and will connect to the network to streamline purchase orders and invoices to ensure more efficient collaboration with more than 10,000 suppliers, and automate nearly one million invoices a year.

“Stability and flexibility in IT initially seem contradictory, but for an innovative, business-enabling IT you need the best of both worlds working together,” Klaus Hardy Mühleck, ThyssenKrupp’s CIO, said at the conference. “ThyssenKrupp is innovating with SAP in many areas including cloud, big data and analytics in order to gain a competitive advantage. IT is key for Industry 4.0, Cooperation 4.0 and digital business.”

Chinese-owned miner MMG’s CIO, Peter McLure, said the company had deployed SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals across multiple regions. The solution aligned individual objectives to business needs, improved agility, refined business focus and generated high-level tracking and reporting.

“We are beginning our cloud journey with quick wins that combine consumergrade experiences and functional capabilities,” McLure said. “Because SuccessFactors is easy to customise, we were able to lift and shift a paper-based process. Our employees find SuccessFactors software intuitive, and managers can focus more on developing our employees and growing the business. The benefits and scalability of a cloud solution are both clear and evident.”

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.com 10/10/2014 10:31

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A selection of articles from Mining Magazine 100 years ago…

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Richard Dolan on: Tel: +44 (0)20 7216 6060 E-mail: richard.dolan@miningmagazine.com Photos courtesy of Zoe C Photography

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Advertising contact – Richard Dolan +44 (0)20 7216 6060 MM_Nov_2014_Class .indd 64

13/02/2014 18:39

November 2014

www.

.com 10/10/2014 10:00

Sp D Co is ecia de cou l 1 : M nt 0% L8 Us 75 e MM

12th Annual

December 1-5, 2014

Business Design Centre | London

Europe’s largest mining investment & capital rising forum J Delivering

J What’s new in 2014?

g 5 days of conference, exhibition and networking functions

g More institutional investors, boutique fund managers and private equity players than ever before!

g 100 mining company spotlight presentations

g Ministers Summit, giving you the chance to network with key government policy makers from around the world

g 260+ mining companies in the exhibition g 1,000+ investors and financiers in attendance

g Greater focus on new emerging markets including Africa and Latin America

g 75 countries represented

g Mining for good summit, sharing positive stories from the mining industry

g 3500+ meetings scheduled in 2013

I guarantee that deals are going to get done here Nolan Watson, CEO, Sandstom Gold

Registration & Enquiries: Visit: www.minesandmoney.com/london email: cs@minesandmoney.com or call +44 (0) 20 7216 6056

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@MinesandMoney

tinyurl.com/MinesandMoney #MMLONDON2014

02/09/2014 14:35

We define performance the way you do.

Uptime and Reliability Metso crushing solutions are focused on the bottom line

It comes down to reaching your goals. And we’re here to help you do that – by overcoming everyday operational challenges, delivering the industry’s best technology, and doing it all with a focus on sustainability. When you partner with Metso, you can expect results. metso.com – email: minerals.info@metso.com

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4/17/2013 10:00:05 AM