EVRAZ makes major fleet investments at KGOK for new Sobstvenno-Kachkanarskoye mine including Cat 994K large wheel loader

EVRAZ KGOK is one of the largest iron ore mines in Russia. Located in the Sverdlovsk region, 140 km from EVRAZ NTMK, EVRAZ KGOK mines titanomagnetite iron ore with vanadium content at the Gusevogorskoe deposit. The vanadium content makes it possible to produce high-strength grades of alloy steel. The Mt Kachkanar deposit is the only source of vanadium ore in Russia. The mine has a capacity of about 58 Mt/y of iron ore with EVRAZ NTMK the primary consumer of EVRAZ KGOK’s products.

The ore is currently mined in four open pits: the Glavny, Zapadny, Severny and Yuzhny deposit open pits. The ore is removed from the pits by mainly BELAZ trucks and then delivered to the crushing plant by rail. The company has recently made a major fleet investment at KGOK for its new Sobstvenno-Kachkanarskoye pit, which is next to the Gusevogorskoye ore deposit and has reserves of 3.3 billion tonnes of ore with an estimated iron content of 16%.

According to local paper Kachanar Worker, this year the company will mine 5 Mt from the new pit this year but it will be mining 13 Mt/y by 2024. It has already invested in nine new machines for the new mine, which include four BELAZ 240 t 75313 electric drive trucks, two Komatsu D475A crawler dozers, a Caterpillar motor grader for road maintenance and a large Cat 994K wheel loader front-end loader for loading ore at the ore transfer point into rail cars, as well as for loading BELAZ trucks in the open pit. The company has also bought a Komatsu P&H 2300XPC rope shovel with a bucket capacity of 20 m3. The Cat machines were supplied by dealer Mantrac Vostok.

In 2022-2024, the company plans to purchase a second Caterpillar 994K wheel loader for Sobstvenno-Kachkanarskoye, along with three more BELAZ 75313 dump trucks and a second Komatsu P&H 2300XPC excavator. In 2021, the first open pit benches will be formed at SCM: + 625 m, + 610 m, + 595 m, + 580 m and +565 m. Two ore transfer stations have also been built at the deposit for handling 6.5 Mt of ore each, to which dump trucks will bring ore from the open pit. To deliver ore to the plant, new railway tracks were built and high-voltage and cable power lines were built. A mine video surveillance system is in place and the expansion of the Zyfra Mining VG Karier mining transport dispatch system has been carried out.