[miningmx.com] – ANGLO American Platinum (Amplats) is carrying out trials on a number of new mining technologies designed to keep its operations viable in a situation where operating costs are rising at a rate three times faster than consumer-inflation rates.
That’s according to Amplats CEO Chris Griffith who – in his presentation to the Mining Indaba being held in Cape Town – unveiled a number of technologically advanced mining systems which could be introduced at Amplat’s Twickenham mine if proved viable.
Griffith told delegates that “… mining needs to leap forward 20 years in the next five … for us at Amplats, that involves moving away from the past conventional, labour-intensive underground mining – with its high demands for people, energy and expensive infrastructure to a modern way of mining.’
He added: “It is quite extraordinary that the global mining industry currently spends so little on innovation and business-improvement programmes.
“On a revenue-to-revenue basis, the industry spends 80% less on technology and innovation compared with the petroleum sector.’
Griffiths added: “We are no longer sitting back and waiting for someone else to innovate and modernise our business, although that has certainly been the case for many decades in South Africa’s narrow reef, conventional mining.”
He said Amplats had now moved to introduction of the “next generation’ of mechanised mining equipment through the expansion of the use of “extra-low profile’ equipment and the testing of “ultra-low profile’ mechanised, remote-controlled mining equipment.
Griffith commented that Amplats was presently replanning its Twickenham mine to be “the first, hard rock mechanised mine to operate with extra-low and ultra-low profile mining technology. The trial project we currently have in place at Bathopele mine currently shows promising results for application at Twickenham.”
Griffith added Amplats was also working on a mining system which will break hard rock without using explosives.
He did not mention it but such technology has long been a “holy grail’ for the South African gold mining industry which has tried for decades to develop it without success.
He commented: “Although a much, more difficult nut to crack … hard rock cutting projects are currently underway at our operations.
“A number of these are collaboration projects between Amplats, Impala Platinum and Joy Global for activated disk cutting in stoping – and Amplats and Atlas Copco for a reef borer – as well as Amplats and Sandvik for compression cutting in stoping.
“These projects are all underground and on trial. Also, with Atlas Copco we are developing a machine that uses disk cutting for high-rate access tunnels. This trial machine will be available for testing at Twickenham mine in the latter part of 2015.
Other “front running technologies’ that Griffith said are being looked at include lasers that can cut rock – or soften rock to allow cutting of hard rock – to replace drilling and blasting; 3D point-cloud geo-spatial technology for real-time profiling of excavations and automated robotic equipment that can remotely detect geological structures.
