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MODERN MINING
July 2015
OFF-HIGHWAY TRUCKS
AND EXCAVATORS
feature
W
hile Caterpillar has ranked
for decades as one of the
world’s biggest suppliers of
equipment for open-pit min-
ing, there were some gaps
in its product offering until several years ago,
notably a lack of big hydraulic shovels, electric
rope shovels and AC electric drive – as opposed
to mechanical drive – off-highway rigid dump
trucks. These omissions were rectified by the
unveiling of the Cat 795F AC, Caterpillar’s first-
ever electric drive truck, and by the acquisition
of American OEM, Bucyrus, in 2011 (in a deal
worth around US$8,8 billion), which added
Bucyrus’s hydraulic and electric rope shovels,
as well as the Unit Rig range of AC drive off-
highway trucks, to Caterpillar’s line-up.
Comments Duthie: “The range that Cater
pillar, and by extension Barloworld Equipment,
now offers to the mining industry is the broad-
est from any OEM and certainly Caterpillar is
the only supplier in the world to offer both rope
and hydraulic shovels. A number of these new
additions to the Caterpillar range have already
been sold to customers in Southern Africa,
including no less than nine Cat 7495 electric
rope shovels, several hydraulic shovels, and six
Cat 795F AC haul trucks.
“Three of the rope shovels have been
deployed at Debswana’s Jwaneng diamond
mine in Botswana, where they are working on
the massive Cut 8 project, a further three are
now working at First Quantum’s newly-com-
missioned Sentinel copper mine in north-west
Zambia, while the final three have been deliv-
ered to Swakop Uranium’s Husab uranium
mine in Namibia.”
The 7495 is the flagship of the Cat electric
rope shovel range. With a rated 109-tonne pay-
load, it has a formidable production capacity
– it can move over 5 000 tonnes an hour – and
can easily service eight or more ultra-trucks. At
all three sites in Southern Africa, the shovels
are loading into non-Caterpillar trucks, reflect-
ing the fact that when the contracts to supply
equipment to these mines were being negoti-
ated, Caterpillar did not yet have the AC drive
haulers the respective clients required. “If these
same contracts were being negotiated today, the
situation could be very different,” says Duthie.
Rope shovels are designed to work a single
face of the correct height, loading well shot
material and need a solid, level floor, with wide
benches to facilitate truck manoeuvrability
aiding hauler ‘spotting’ time. Where these con-
ditions are not met but high production rates
are nevertheless required, Caterpillar can now
provide, as an alternative, the hydraulic face
shovels acquired in the Bucyrus deal (although
it should be stressed that the Bucyrus name
has now vanished and that the shovels have
all been ‘Caterpillarised’ to include the latest
Caterpillar technology). These are designed
to work at multiple face heights, in tough dig-
ging applications and tight loading areas, and
can easily handle less than ideal underfoot
To handle the huge volumes of material, both ore and
waste, which have to be moved in the modern generation
of super-pit mines (loosely defined as those where material
movements exceed 100 Mt a year), the major mining equip-
ment manufacturers have been steadily upscaling the size
of their dump trucks and loading tools over recent years. At
the forefront of this trend is Caterpillar, which now offers
an extraordinarily broad range of heavy mining equipment
for surface mining, as Ian Duthie, GM Legacy Cat Mining at
Barloworld Equipment, the Cat dealer for Southern Africa,
recently explained to
Modern Mining’s
Arthur Tassell.
New breed of ultra-size machines