Sibanye Gold begins intensive search for appropriate mining technology
Sibanye Gold CEO Neal Froneman and new senior vice-president safe technology Peter Turner discuss the company’s new search for appropriate technology with Mining Weekly Online’s Martin Creamer. Video and Video Editing: Darlene Creamer.
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Gold-mining company Sibanye Gold has begun an intensive search for appropriate technology to make the work of mining safer, easier and more productive.
The JSE- and NYSE-listed company has mandated highly experienced mining operational executive and mechanical engineer Peter Turner to drive what the company calls safe technology.
“It’s an issue of time now. We have to move on these things and we need to get the process going. We’re going to put a structure in place to deal with this and then really push it hard,” Turner told Mining Weekly Online in a video interview. (See attached).
Full collaboration with other industry leaders is planned.
“In the mines of South Africa, the more we collaborate, the better for everybody,” senior vice president (SVP) Turner said.
With the full backing of the Sibanye executive, Turner will be going all out to introduce technology that enhances safety and boosts productivity in the company’s labour-intensive, manual operations.
Sibanye, which reported five more mineworker deaths in the six months to June 30, is striving to engineer out risk and will soon issue radio frequency detection tags to all underground employees so that they can be located very quickly.
This follows two Sibanye employees being lost in a mine during the last quarter.
For the longer term, the company will also search for advanced technology for the next generation of mineworkers coming in, who already know their way around smart phones and iPads and can be hitched more readily to new technology thrusts.
New technology has the potential to unlock what Turner described as “a massive opportunity” to mine, in addition to the company’s primary reefs, secondary reefs that still need to be exploited, including the Kloof, Libanon and the Middelvlei reefs, as well as four-million ounces of gold in pillars.
On AngloGold Ashanti’s new South African technology, which is said to mine all the gold, only the gold, all the time, safely, Turner said Sibanye intended holding discussions with AngloGold Ashanti.
“There’s no doubt that if the technology works and they share that technology with us, we’ll also embrace it,” he told Mining Weekly Online.
He will also be visiting Anglo American Platinum, where Mining Weekly Online understands the company has remotely controlled extra-low-profile equipment suites that can function automatically in narrow reef.
“We’re ultra deep in many areas and we’re also looking at getting the person away from the face in a safe position and mine in a simpler, easier and more effective and productive way.
“We’ll have a whole bouquet of technologies that we will challenge,” Turner said, not ruling out the likes of selected blast mining (SBM) possibly playing a role and also examining nonexplosive mining techniques, which have been tested for many years but never implemented.
Veteran research commentator Dr R E (Robbie) Robinson has reiterated that SBM, which fractures the rock in such a way that the reef remains intact, could be introduced immediately in narrow-reef gold mining situations.
Centre for Mechanised Mining Systems Steering Committee chairperson Rod Pickering made the point earlier this year that it was “absolutely unacceptable” for the South African mining industry to continue mining its hard-rock, narrow-reef resources conventionally.
Pickering, who spoke to Mining Weekly Online at the centre’s base at the University of the Witwatersrand, warned that the country would end up with closed gold and platinum mines if it failed to introduce new ways of mining.
“Hard-rock, narrow-reef mining has to change,” said Pickering, who spent 20 years with the now-defunct Chamber of Mines Research Organisation (Comro), where he ran the stoping-technology laboratory, which was Comro’s focus on narrow-reef, hard-rock mines.
A mining company has engaged Pickering to combine SBM with mechanised equipment in the mining of a 400-mm-thick reef.
The project involves carrying out long-hole drilling and using SBM to blast the waste material into the back of the stope to form a dense backfill.
Under Pickering’s scenario, dangerous stopes become no-go areas and known technologies are packaged to achieve lower costs and greater safety.
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