ON THE GROUND
Alphamin has managed to hack a way through thick forest from Walikale to Bisie to build a road, which is about 35km.
Trevor Faber, chief operating officer at Bisie, is known to have built several mines from scratch in remote areas of Africa, and is doing it again in Kivu.
“ We will only have three contractors on site: the mining contractor, the earthworks and civils contractor, and the SMPP contractor,” says Faber. The civil and earthworks contractor will most likely be South Africa-based Teichmann’ s DRC subsidiary, Kongo River.
Kongo River’ s fleet of Bell equipment has already started the preliminary earthworks and bush clearing for Bisie’ s airstrip, construction of which is imminent. Kongo River recently completed an extremely successful project at Randgold’ s Kibali gold mine, north-east 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, situated 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 the 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 have been on site since the start of the project.
Procuring 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, and its mining division, which 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 Volvo, Scania, or MAN,” says Faber.
The Atlas Copco LHD is a 10-tonne class loader and the tipper trucks will be equipped with an 18cm ³ bin. When fully loaded, the truck will carry about 20t of material. The specific gravity of the Bisie ore is 3.5t / m ³, and Faber says the bin sizes on the rock-moving equipment had to be reduced to prevent damage to the hydraulic system, suspension, and transmission. The trucks will tip the ore on surface stockpiles, from where it will be fed by Bell front-end loaders into the processing plant. A set of primary, secondary, and tertiary crushers will reduce the run of mine ore from 450mm to 80 % passing minus 10mm. The minus 10mm material forms the feed for the jigs. The underflow from the jigs is fed through a series of shaking tables and spirals to create a final concentrate containing about 62 % tin. A flotation step is required to remove the sulphide minerals from the tin concentrate, following which the concentrate is thickened and filtered to reduce its moisture content. Filtration will be carried out on horizontal belt filters, supplied by South African company Roytech.
Shipping out Once bagged, the tin will have to be trucked to Goma, and this is where the operation becomes tricky. The road to Goma is in a very bad condition; however, Alphamin is assisting the North Kivu Province in upgrading the road over the next six months. The strategy is to have rough-terrain 4 × 4 trucks cover the portion of road from the village of Logu to the mine( about 35km), which is extremely rough conditions. At Logu, the product is then reloaded onto normal road trucks that will transport it further to Goma, where the customers will take over the logistics, and truck the tin to either Dar es Salaam in Tanzania or to Mombasa in Kenya. TMK, a local DRC transport company, has been contracted to
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FEBRUARY 2018