Modern Mining July 2016

COAL

numbers just five people, headed by Mine Manager Baat Leonard. Elandspruit is essentially a pure min- ing operation as the wash plant that serves it – known simply as Wescoal Processing – is located 18 km away. Says Botes: “This is a fairly new plant that was originally built around eight years ago for Muhanga Mines. We purchased it in 2014 for R42,5 million. This is a very competitive price for a fully operational, fully permitted facility which – now that we have de-bottlenecked it and enhanced it in certain areas – has the capacity to treat up to 200 000 tons of ROM a month. The asphalt- surfaced road between the mine and the plant is in excellent condition and we use a trans- port contractor – SG Coal – to transport the coal between the mine and the plant.” The plant – which is operated on behalf of Wescoal by Pentalin Processing under the direction of Wescoal’s Processing Manager, Jaap Kruger – has a multi-product capabil- ity enabling Wescoal to meet the demands of Eskom, other domestic consumers and the export market. Summing up, Botes says that the combina- tion of Elandspruit and the processing plant is operating extremely well. “The emphasis will now be on introducing initiatives to enhance operational efficiencies and reduce operational risk – for example, by optimising and upgrading water management and the road network sys- tems at Elandspruit. From a strategic point of view, we now have in place two key assets that will provide a platform that assures Wescoal Mining’s future for many years to come.” Photos by Arthur Tassell/Wescoal

several years ever since we acquired the prop- erty in a mining rights exchange with Xstrata in 2012,” he states. “We were originally hoping to get into production by 2014 but the permit- ting process took longer than anticipated and the water use licence was only granted in early 2015. This enabled us to approve mine development in April last year and by the end of July the mine had delivered its first coal. Within three months it ramped up to its target of 165 kt/month. Wescoal is currently selling coal to Eskom on short-term contracts and the parties are in discussions to conclude a long- term coal supply agreement.” The new mine – whose neighbours include Graspan – is exploiting the Nos 4, 3, 2 and 1 seams of the Witbank coalfield, which between them have a combined thickness of around 12 m of coal, all within 70 m of surface. The seams are near horizontal in formation and devoid of geological complexities. When Modern Mining was on site recently – in the company of Dutch Botes – the opera- tion was entirely open pit although a small underground section was in the planning stages. Following the outsourcing model Wescoal uses on all its mines, mining is in the hands of Diesel Power Opencast Mining which has deployed a mining fleet consisting of six excavators and a trucking fleet compris- ing Bell B40 and B50 ADTs and Cat 785 rigid mining trucks. A standard roll-over mining method with rehabilitation on an on-going basis has been adopted. The total workforce on site totals roughly 250 people, who are mostly from the mining contractor. The Wescoal contingent

“Mining is not complicated. The fundamentals are well understood and our goal is to perform those fundamentals better than anyone else.”

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