UNDERGROUND LOAD & HAUL
Gertjan Bekkers, VP, Mines Technical Services, Torex Gold Resources, on stage at The Electric Mine 2025
and Rock Solutions, said the success of its own load and haul diesel platform makes it increasingly difficult to build alternatives that compete with it.
“ Our diesel trucks are already really, really efficient and it makes it comparisons challenging, to be honest,” he told delegates at the event.
Despite this, Huff and Gertjan Bekkers, VP, Mines Technical Services, Torex Gold Resources, decided to tackle it head on in the‘ Real-world insights: Sandvik BEV vs diesel performance at Torex Gold’ s Minera Media Luna mine’ presentation at the event.
Looking at the performance of Sandvik LH518iBs and Sandvik LH514s operating at Torex’ s Media Luna operation in Mexico proved interesting viewing.
The reason for the comparison – aside from the fact that Torex was using three Sandvik LH514s and six LH518iBs already – was that the 14-t payload diesel-powered vehicle has roughly the same footprint as the 18-t payload battery-electric, automationready vehicle.
“ We design these machines from the ground up, so that our frames, our drive lines, all of our actuation systems are built to capitalise on the improved power capability for electrification,” Huff offered up as context.“ And that means we can do more in a smaller package.”
During integration of the loaders at Media Luna, the battery-electric machine lagged its diesel-powered baseline, but the graph Bekkers showed saw the lines converge around six months into the loader integration process. The BEV fleet also required comparable maintenance efforts to the diesel loaders over the studied timeframe.
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Yet, taking March 2025 alone – a month where the LH518iBs dumped more than 4,700 bucket loads for around 78,000 t of delivered material – both the energy consumption and energy cost on kWh / t and $/ operating hour metrics for the batteryelectric loaders were 86 % and 84 % lower, respectively.
“ And this didn’ t include the energy that was being regenerated and offered back to the battery from these battery-electric loaders during regenerative braking,” Bekkers said.
Another interesting observation made in this presentation was that even though the company relied on a fossil fuel dominated grid to charge the batteries on these LH518iBs, the carbon emissions associated with operating them was 78 % lower than using the diesel-powered LH514s.
Even with the need to charge the batteries, Bekkers and his team were seeing higher productivity from the battery-electric units than the diesel equivalent. He added:“ We really feel like this( a battery-electric load and haul fleet) is the only way to go in [ developing ] an underground mine.”
The battery base
That same presentation also tackled the embedded emissions associated with manufacturing the batteries that go into these loaders, with a slide highlighting that the time per battery-electric vehicle to offset the battery manufacturing emissions was 942 operating hours, or less than three months of operation at a 350 operating hours per month rate.
Sandvik says it develops its own batteryelectric loader and truck batteries in-house, giving it full control over R & D and enabling rapid response to customer requests and aftermarket needs.
“ A specific engineering goal has been to minimise the likelihood of incidents and to design an efficient battery system by utilising chemistry that best fits the load and haul application,” the OEM said.“ The Artisan ® battery packs are purpose-designed for underground use.”
The battery cells use lithium-iron phosphate( LFP) chemistry, which the company says have a longer lifetime than the cells using the more commonly used cobalt-based lithium-ion chemistry. It added:“ This chemistry reduces the likelihood and intensity of thermal events and is known for its structural stability. In the case of a battery cell thermal event, the energy, heating rate and maximum temperature are considerably lower than that of other lithiumion chemistries.”
For charging depleted batteries, a Sandvik charging station AG320 or AC060 and a connection to the mine’ s electric grid are all mine operators require, the company claims. The charging station consists of charging and cooling units that form a functional entity, with any Sandvik-branded BEV loader or truck able to use the charger.
“ The units are all the same size, contributing to flexible and organised positioning of the charging station,” Sandvik said.“ The units can be placed next to each other on the ground and locked together with a special bar. To save ground space, they can also be stacked, with the cooler on top of the charger.”
Agnostic approach
Batteries and charging cropped up in many presentations featuring Epiroc BEVs, too, with positive battery-electric reference cases from Black Rock Mining in South Africa and AngloGold Ashanti in Brazil.
The OEM has also recently built in charging flexibility to one of its newest underground battery-electric loaders, the 10-t-payload Scooptram ST10 G.
This machine, which offers up to four hours of drive time on a single battery charge, is a great choice for forward-thinking mines aiming to go electric in drift sizes down to 3.5 x 3.5 m, with maintained control of their investment costs, according to Mary Zhu, Global Product Manager of the Scooptram line.
Based on the Scooptram ST1030 conventional unit and paired with the company’ s electric drivetrain and battery system, the technology used in this loader already has thousands of operating hours from customer sites, Zhu added.
It features a nominal battery capacity of 270 kWh, with this battery able to be swapped, if needed, or benefit from onboard opportunity charging through a
International Mining | JULY 2025