COAL CONVEYOR The incline conveyor is designed for 3 350 t/h and will operate at 2 900 t/h, while the overland conveyor is designed for 2 400 t/h and will operate at 2 000 t/h
Engineered solutions provider ELB Engineering Services is nearing the completion of the 27-km-long materials handling conveyor for coal miner Sasol Mining’s Impumelelo colliery, in Secunda, Mpumalanga.
Speaking at the company’s technology day in Johannesburg last month, ELB business development GM and director Tony Pinto said the company had been working on the project since June 2012 and that the conveyor was in the hot-commissioning phase.
He explained that the single-flight conveyor system would transport coal from the mine to the Sasol Synfuels plant, in Secunda. The incline conveyor was designed for 3 350 t/h and will operate at 2 900 t/h, while the overland conveyor was designed for 2 400 t/h and will operate at 2 000 t/h.
“The materials handling system will transport coal at a 17° incline from an underground surge bunker through an incline conveyor to the surface,” stated Pinto.
He said the system would then extract the coal from a 15 000 t surface-based coal-bunkering system and transport it to a 4 000 t bunker, from where it would be fed onto the main coal-supply conveyor to the synfuels plant or it could bypass the bunker and be fed directly onto the reclaim conveyor, from where it would be fed onto the main coal-supply conveyor to the synfuels plant.
The current reserves at Sasol’s Brandspruit mine are nearing depletion and will be replaced by those provided by the Impumelelo mine. The new mine will be ramped up to produce 8.5-million tons a year, with a materials handling system that can accommodate a production rate of 10.5-million tons a year.
The coal will be used exclu-sively for Sasol Synfuels plants.