Mine excursion
Alphamin has managed to hack
a way through thick forest from
Walikale to Bisie to build a road,
which is about 35km.
crush up to 60 000t of ore a month.
The jigging section of the plant will have
a processing capacity of 36 000t a month.
The jigs remove about 90% of the material
from the flow into the plant, which
leaves a small gravity plant capable of
treating up to 4 000t of underflow from
the jigs a month. The tin is concentrated
in a simple gravity circuit consisting
only of shaking tables and spirals.
“At the back end of the plant before
we filter and bag our product, we
need to remove the sulphide minerals,
so we take our concentrate through
a flotation plant consisting of three
small flotation cells,” explains Faber.
Mobilising the contractors
Construction work on the plant and
associated infrastructure will start in
February 2018. At the time of writing
(November 2017) only the Structural,
Mechanical, Piping and Plating (SMPP)
contractor was officially appointed.
“We will only have three contractors
on site, the mining contractor, earthworks
and civils contractor and the SMPP
contractor,” says Faber. The civil and
earthworks contractor will most likely
be South African-based Teichmann’s
[18] MINING MIRROR JANUARY 2018
DRC subsidiary Kongo River.
Kongo River’s fleet of Bell equipment
has already started the preliminary
earthworks and bush clearing for
Bisie’s airstrip, of which construction
is imminent. Kongo River recently
completed an extremely successful project
at Rangold’s Kibali gold mine, northeast
of Bisie in the Orientale province,
and is one of only a few companies
that really understands the operating
environment in the DRC. Reliant SPRL
is the mining contractor appointed to
develop the first phase of the decline
and is based in Kolwezi, in the Lualaba
Province in the south of the DRC.
The contract for the first phase of
mine development ends in March 2018,
and tenders for the second phase of
mine development have been received
from several international mining
contractors. Group Five Construction
has been appointed as SMPP contractor.
“It is important that contractors
know the eastern parts of the DRC,
especially the logistics and infrastructure.
Group Five has done a lot of good
work at Kibali, as has Teichmann.
It is difficult for contractors to do
their first job in these parts of the
DRC. It is a very complex country to
operate in,” says Faber. In addition to
the contractors already mentioned,
engineering consultants, DRA, has been
on-site since the start of the project.
Procuring the equipment
Alphamin has procured a fleet of mining
equipment from underground hard rock
mining specialists Atlas Copco, now
Epiroc (the company recently split its
operations into an industrial arm, still
known as Atlas Copco, while its mining
division is called Epiroc). The equipment
includes three drill rigs (one for the face,
one to install support and a long hole
drill rig), and a 10-tonne class LHD.
After blasting the LHD will dump
the ore into rigid body tipper trucks.
Alphamin has elected to use rigid body
tipper trucks underground instead of
the conventional Articulated Dump
Trucks (ADTs). “We visited several
mines in Peru and China where they
use these rigid body tipper trucks.
In Peru, the Volvo rigid tipper is
popular underground and based on
their safety and performance levels
we decided to acquire four of these
trucks, which will be sourced from