Siemens Chile has received an order from Codelco Norte to take over additional maintenance work in the Radomiro Tomic open-pit copper mine in Chile. The project involves Siemens maintaining the ore crusher and conveyor belt system for an initial period of six years. The value of the order is around $20 million. Siemens has been responsible for the maintenance of Radomiro Tomic’s hydrometallurgic facilities since August 2008.
Codelco’s Norte Division includes the Chuquicamata and Radomiro Tomic open-pit mines near Calama in the Antofagasta Region. Together, they extract more than half of Codelco’s total copper production. The Radomiro Tomic opencast mine was opened up in the 1990s, and lies around 3,000 m above sea level.
This year, a new ore crusher was installed in Radomiro Tomic to crush the sulphide ore mined there, and a conveyor belt system was constructed to transport the ore to the Chuquicamata processing plant. Siemens will be responsible for maintaining the mechanical and electrical components, as well as for the instrumentation of the ore crusher and the conveyor belt system, and will handle the planning, scheduling and performance of all the maintenance tasks. Some 140 Siemens employees are already maintaining the mine’s hydrometallurgical facilities, which include the leaching, SX and electrolysis plants.