Having made significant progress on converting its full underground truck fleet to battery-electric operation, Newcrest Mining’s Brucejack gold mine in British Columbia, Canada, is starting the process for its loading equipment.
Brucejack is a high-grade underground gold-silver mine using long-hole stoping and a combination of longitudinal and transverse mining, depending on zone width and orientation. The ore is crushed underground and conveyed to surface where the fully-enclosed mill produces gold-silver dore bars and flotation concentrate.
Despite a stoppage for an extensive safety review in the December quarter – which followed a tragic fatality in October – the mine is expected to produce 320,000-370,000 oz of gold in the year to the end of June 2023.
In the company’s half-year 2023 financial year results, released this week, it confirmed its final Sandvik Z50 50-t payload battery-electric truck was due on site in March. The arrival of this vehicle – the eighth at Brucejack – will complete the full truck fleet at the mine.
Alongside this, the company says it is set to commence a trial with a battery-electric LHD that arrived on site this month.
Newcrest later confirmed to IM that the vehicle in question was a Sandvik LH518B, an 18-t payload machine that features a 600 kW drivetrain to allow for higher acceleration than conventional loaders as well as fast ramp speeds. Courtesy of its space-efficient battery system and driveline, it is the most compact 18-t loader on the market, capable of fitting in a 4.5 x 4.5 m tunnel, the OEM claims.
On the expected benefits of the new BEV truck fleet, Newcrest said it was anticipating improved truck productivity, lower unit costs and the abatement of approximately 65,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions through to 2030.
The project is being partly funded thanks to a C$7.95 million ($5.9 million) investment from the CleanBC Industry Fund.
It is also part of a wider transformation program Newcrest established for the asset following the acquisition of former owner Pretium Resources in 2022.
In addition to the BEV truck and LHD work included in this program, the company is also rolling out the “NewSafe program” to reinforce safety culture, carrying out a debottlenecking study set to investigate a mill capacity increase to 4,500-5,000 t/d, and conducting trials of ore sorting technology to classify and separate mineralised material to deliver more consistent mill feed grades.