Tag Archives: tunnel boring

Anglo American increases Woodsmith polyhalite scale as shaft sinking progresses

Energy minerals, Mine shafts and equipment, Mineral project development, Mining services, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anglo American is upping the ante at its Woodsmith polyhalite project in the UK, increasing its planned spend while expanding its production scope following detailed design reviews and non-critical path studies.

In the company’s 2022 results release today, it said these reviews and studies had led to a number of areas being modified to align with Anglo American’s standards and its aim to optimise value for the long term.

The outcome is an enhanced project configuration to ensure the company delivers maximum commercial returns from Woodsmith over the expected multi-decade asset life, Anglo said. Included within this is an increase in the capacity of the shafts and other infrastructure to accommodate higher production volumes and more efficient and scalable mining methods over time.

More specifically, this has seen the company plan for a circa-13 Mt/y operation instead of the previous 10 Mt/y operation it had endorsed, subject to studies and approval.

“In light of these changes, Anglo now expects first product to market in 2027, with an annual capital investment of around $1 billion,” the company said.

Spending of $800 million is approved for 2023, with the bulk of initial spend on the shaft sinking and tunnel boring activities. As usual in developing underground mines, the schedule will largely be determined by the ground conditions encountered as sinking activities progress.

The Woodsmith project is located on the North Yorkshire coast, just south of Whitby, where polyhalite ore will be extracted via 1.6-km-deep mine shafts and transported to Teesside via an underground conveyor belt in a 37 km tunnel, thereby minimising any environmental impact on the surface. It will then be granulated at a materials handling facility to produce a low carbon fertiliser – known as POLY4 – that will then be exported from its port facility, where it has priority access, to a network of customers around the world.

During 2022, as part of the mentioned construction review, contracts were awarded for the shaft sinking operations, program management services and construction management to ensure the project can be executed in line with Anglo American’s stringent requirements. These contracts were awarded to Redpath (shaft sinking) and Worley (program management services and construction management).

With the award of these contracts and other infrastructure improvements, activities at the deep shafts have progressed. The service shaft is now more than 360 m deep, while shaft sinking began 120 m below the surface for the production shaft in January 2023, as planned. Both of these shafts are being sunk using Herrenknecht’s Shaft Boring Roadheader technology.

Three intermediate shafts will provide both ventilation and additional access to the mineral transport system (MTS) tunnel. The Lockwood Beck intermediate access shaft was successfully completed in 2022 and is fully lined and connected to the tunnel. Work on the MTS shaft at the mine head progressed through 2022 and is 85% complete, and the excavation at the final intermediate access shaft at the Ladycross site commenced in early 2023.

Following a planned maintenance pause in mid-2022 to refurbish the tunnel boring machine and allow the connection with the Lockwood Beck shaft, the MTS tunnel is now past the 21-km point and is more than 56% complete, progressing at rates not seen since the start of the tunnelling activities, Anglo said.

Anglo American concluded: “We believe that the changes we have made to the project have had a materially positive impact on the project’s long-term attractiveness and prospects. However, for accounting purposes at this early stage of the project’s development, we have recognised an impairment of $1.7 billion to the carrying value of the asset within special items and remeasurements, reflecting the extension of the development schedule and capital budget.”

VDMA anticipates Germany mining tech sales drop in 2021

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While demand for metals and minerals has boosted order intake for many original equipment manufacturers, the sales of Germany mining technology companies have lagged so far in 2021, according to the VDMA.

In 2020, the industry generated total sales of €3.38 billion ($3.83 billion), the organisation, which represents around 3,300 German and European mechanical and plant engineering companies, said. From January to September 2021, sales were down 18% year-on-year at €2.8 billion, while exports in the January-August 2021 period were down 10.4% year-on-year at just under €960 million. Notable drops in export sales were observed in the EU27+UK, China, Russia and Australia, with increases in the USA and NM East unable to make up for that shortfall.

The industry expects sales to pick up by the end of 2021 and anticipates only a moderate decline of 5-10% overall, the VDMA said.

The most common export goods to all markets are, in descending order: crushing and grinding technology, deep drilling technology, mining and roadheaders and tunnel boring machines, the organisation noted.

Michael Schulte Strathaus, Chairman of VDMA Mining (pictured in the centre), expects sales numbers to improve, going forward, as the ‘green mining’ revolution continued to take hold.

“Without mining technology, nothing works in industry now and in the future,” he said at a press conference. “If we want to maintain our current standard of living, we need the corresponding raw materials.

“Only smart mining will lead to green mining. We see our opportunities in offering the best technology worldwide that contributes to resource-saving, efficient, ‘green’ extraction and processing of raw materials.”

Master Drilling’s Mobile Tunnel Borer heads to Anglo’s Mogalakwena mine

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Master Drilling is readying its Mobile Tunnel Borer (MTB) technology for a contract at Anglo American Platinum’s Mogalakwena mine in South Africa.

The company, which revealed the news during its interim results presentation, said on-boarding for this project deployment was underway, with the start of “decline excavation” due by the end of the year.

Anglo American Platinum said in its own interim results recently that it was working on feasibility studies on the future of Mogalakwena, with completion of these studies expected at the end of 2021. Decisions on the pathway forward are expected shortly after this, however, one of the current key milestones at the asset includes progressing an underground exploration decline.

Master Drilling Executive Director, Koos Jordaan, said during the presentation that the contract with Anglo American Platinum is for a “turnkey operation” with Master Drilling providing capabilities in terms of construction, logistics and project management, in addition to its normal excavation services.

The MTB is a modular horizontal cutting machine equipped with full-face cutter head with disc cutters adapted from traditional tunnel boring machines. Unlike these traditional machines, it is designed to work both on inclines and declines, with the ability to navigate around corners and construct 5.5 m diameter decline access tunnels.

One MTB unit was previously scheduled to carry out a 1.4 km project at Northam Platinum’s Eland platinum group metals operation in South Africa, however this was cancelled in March 2020 due to the pandemic. This deployment followed testing of an MTB unit in soft rock at a quarry just outside of Rome, Italy, in 2018.

Alongside news of this latest MTB deployment, Master Drilling said in its results that it was studying the potential to deploy two of these MTB units in tandem for twin-decline access as part of the technology’s second-generation developments.

“We can already see the benefit of utilising two of these machines to do a twin-decline access to an orebody,” Jordaan said.

Looking to vertical developments, Master Drilling reported that it had received shareholder funding approval from the Industrial Development Corporation for the latest work on its Shaft Boring System (SBS), designed to sink 4.5 m diameter shafts in hard rock down to 1,500 m depths.

IM witnessed the main cutting mechanism of what was previously billed as being a 45-m long, 450-t machine at the back end of 2019.

The company has since said it will introduce a “smaller scope system” as part of its introduction to the industry.

While busy on the latest slimmed down design of the SBS, Master Drilling has signed a letter of intent with a prospective South Africa project that could see a machine start sinking activities in the first half of 2022, Jordaan said.

Outside of these developments, Master Drilling reported on several contract awards across the globe, including a three-year raiseboring extension with AngloGold Ashanti in Brazil, a joint venture agreement with Besalco Construction to work on Codelco’s Chuquicamata copper mine, an executed contract with Glencore’s Raglan mine in Canada, an agreement with Zimplats in Zimbabwe and a “long-term contract” on the Khoemacau copper-silver project in Botswana.