MINE EXCURSION
"When we arrived,
these plants were clogged
up solid and shut down, so the
team had to rewire, strip and re-
assemble them – a process that
took us the better part of six
months.
The mine ends up with a stock-pile of one and a half million tonnes of
unprocessed fines of less than 1mm which will hold about 700 000t or
800 000t of sellable ore.
capacity. At that tempo the mine was on target to produce
anywhere between 450 000 and 500 000 tonnes per year. In
parallel, Afrimat commenced with construction of a load out
station about three kilometres from the mine site and towards
the end of 2017 negotiated a million-tonne per annum take off
agreement with Transnet.
However, the mine suffered a set-back early in 2018 when
Transnet informed management that they could not provide
the million tonnes per annum allocation any longer. “This was a
huge set-back because we geared our mine to produce and sell
a million tonnes a year, forcing us to cut back production with
almost 43%. Through continued engagements with Transnet
during the next five or six months, eventually, in August 2018,
we managed to secure and ramp up to 900 000 tonnes of export
capacity per year. It required increasing the rail track capacity of
our load out facility to take a whole train instead of half a train,”
Odendaal explains. Since August 2018 Demaneng has been
producing close to its original target of one million tonnes of
iron ore per annum.
Rebuilding the DMS
Afrimat inherited two Dense Media Separation (DMS)
beneficiation plants which, Odendaal says is more efficient
than using a jig. “When we arrived, these plants were clogged
up solid and shut down, so the team had to rewire, strip and
re-assemble them – a process that took us the better part of
six months,” he says. The larger plant can produce about 160t
of final product per hour, while the smaller plant has a capacity
of 110t per hour. According to Odendaal the existing crusher
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African Mining February 2020
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