The final batch of 28 newly manufactured advanced drilling rigs under a R2-billion multiyear contract with mining services group Rosond has made its way to Anglo American-controlled Kumba Iron Ore, in the Northern Cape, with expectations that the new range will be fully operational early this year.

Rosond started rolling out the rigs to Kumba’s Kolomela and Sishen mines in 2020 after officially securing the tender to develop and implement a five-year next-generation drilling contract in 2019, as Kumba modernises its geoscience operations.

The project will also extend to Kumba’s greenfield project to extend the life-of-mine of its operations.

Despite Covid-19-related lockdowns and restrictions hampering manufacturing somewhat, particularly as the company’s manufacturing partner is based in Italy, one of the first countries to be hit the hardest by the pandemic, Rosond delivered the final two rigs in December after managing to compress a year’s worth of work into six months.

“I am happy to say that, although not all the machines will be operational by the end of the year, all of them will have left our workshops. The last two will be leaving this week and we have fully deployed all the machines onto site. We are excited to start 2021 with getting them all operational,” Rosond MD Ricardo Ribeiro told Engineering News & Mining Weekly in December.

The fleet, manufactured in conjunction with the undisclosed Italian manufacturer, comprises mostly advanced exploration drill rigs, to be used for core, percussion and reverse-circulation drilling.

The drills offer much-improved safety, as a sizeable amount of the manual work is automated, and eliminates the substantial physical strength required for the handling of rods and heavy equipment that have to be loaded and offloaded onto the drill rig.

The operators are housed in a climate-controlled, airconditioned control room, providing a better working environment, which should assist with fatigue management, facilitate enhanced concentration and increase productivity.

The machines have been developed to transform the way drilling is done, bringing together automation, software and data analytics and machine learning to create a new-age drilling rig as Rosond starts transitioning into a drilling technology company, says Ribeiro.

“Our software system, telemetry system and data collection, along with the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, is something that we are really looking into [as we] believe that it is going to be a game changer in the future,” he tells Engineering News & Mining Weekly, noting the conversion is much like one from an analogue system to a digital one.

However, the opportunity lies in the substantial amount of data that will be available for analysis.

“We are going to have 28 drill rigs with telemetry systems within an 80 km radius for one contract, so you know the data collection that we will be having for those machines is immense.

“Automation and machines get developed, and get better, but the software and the digital platform that we are bringing into this industry might, we believe, be a world first,” he says, noting that Rosond has been involved in the research and development of the next-generation drill rigs for more than five years.

As new technology changes the way mines undertake drilling activities, the advances have also enabled the deployment of a newly trained all-female drilling team at Kumba.

An all-female drilling crew is believed to be unique and a first for South African mining, as jobs for drilling operators were historically reserved for men, owing to the physical strength and stamina required for lifting heavy drill rods during long shifts.

“It is safer, owing to less manual intervention in the operation of the drill rig, which reduces the chance of operators being injured on the job.”

Recruiting and training such a crew was the aim of Rosond’s agreement with Kumba and part of Rosond’s long-term vision for gender equality.

“I think that for us, as Rosond, Anglo American and Kumba Iron Ore, to be able to deploy what we believe are the most highly technical machine exploration drill rigs in the world, it is a good story to tell,” Ribeiro concludes.