Modern Mining February 2015

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EVENTS
characterised this as “a much more difficult nut
to crack” but told delegates that Amplats had a
number of projects underway at its operations.
“A number of these are collaboration proj-
ects between Amplats, Impala and Joy Global
for activated disk cutting in stoping, and
Amplats and Atlas Copco for a reef borer, and
Amplats and Sandvik for compression cutting
in stoping,” he elaborated. “These projects are
all underground and on trial. Also with Atlas
Copco we are developing a machine that uses
disk cutting for high rate access tunnels. This
trial machine will be available for testing at
Twickenham mine in the latter party of 2015.”
Summing up
One could write pages on the pluses and
minuses of this year’s Mining Indaba but suffice
it to say that the content (in terms of presen-
tations) was of a very high quality and fully
comparable with previous years. The organ-
isation was excellent (and probably superior
to previous events) but attendance – a figure
of around 6 750 was given to Modern Mining
by the organisers – showed no year-on-year
growth. In the exhibition area, suppliers of
goods and services (as opposed to mining and
exploration companies) were much in evidence
with some delegates complaining to Modern
Mining that the character of the trade show was
inexorably changing year by year, and not nec-
essarily for the better. Overall, however, most
delegates and exhibitors seemed reasonably
happy with the event and its status as Africa’s
leading mining show and a mandatory meet-
ing place for Africa’s mining industry is clearly
under no immediate threat.
Photos (unless otherwise acknowledged) courtesy of Mining
Indaba™
Vedanta assembles team for Gamsberg project
Ivanhoe’s Kipushi project is not
the only major zinc develop-
ment planned in Southern Africa.
Another is the Gamsberg project
of Vedanta Resources, which will
see the development of an open-
pit zinc mine near Aggeneys in the
Northern Cape. Construction of
phase one will start this year and
deliver a 4,4 Mt/a ROM project but
Vedanta is eventually targeting a
‘mega pit’with a capacity of 10 Mt/a
ROM. The project was described by
Vedanta’s CEO, Tom Albanese, who
said the current focus was on put-
ting together a world-class project
team to drive delivery. As he said,
“Given the excess capacity in the
market, we see an opportunity to
recruit the best skills.” 