Wenco International Mining Systems has announced a successful bid to provide fleet management and supplementary mining technology at Gold Fields Ltd’s forthcoming Salares Norte site in Chile. Salares Norte is a greenfield gold-silver mine located in the Atacama Desert, roughly 330 km from the city of Diego de Almagro. Fluor is providing comprehensive engineering, procurement and construction management services for the project.
Gold Fields has acquired the Wenco fleet management system and BenchManager high-precision machine guidance systems to manage the site’s excavators, drills, and dozers. The site has also ordered high-precision systems for use on its fleet of trucks. “Using this Wenco technology, site personnel can gather real-time data that supports rapid decision-making from a single source of truth to increase productivity in a safe and sustainable manner.”
The system at Salares Norte will run using 4G LTE telecommunications technology and Gold Fields is working with Nokia, ABB and Claro on connectivity and remote monitoring, including the use of ABB’s 800xA Control System.
In addition to fleet management and machine guidance technology, Salares Norte has also purchased Wenco’s ReadyLine asset health management system to reduce unplanned downtime and extend the life of their equipment.
“Salares Norte is an exciting opportunity for us,” says Wenco Regional Manager — Latin America José Eugenio Saravia. “Gold Fields is one of the largest gold mining companies in the world and we already have a strong relationship with them through the St Ives project in Australia. The recent successes we’ve had throughout Latin America — from Mexico through to Argentina — really shows the expansion of Wenco’s capabilities in the region in just the past few years. Now, such a major customer within the region really showcases the level of commitment and service we’re able to offer throughout the region.”
The Salares Norte main haulage fleet is composed of 18 Caterpillar 191 t class 789D trucks supplied by Finning. Nine of them were due to be onsite at the mine in March 2021 while the rest will begin to arrive in 2022. The fleet will be operated by mining contractor Ingeniería Civil Vicente (ICV) with the trucks loaded using large hydraulic shovels.