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MODERN MINING
May 2017
feature
CRUSHING, SCREENING
AND MILLING
A
ccording to B&E International
Managing Director Dewald Janse
van Rensburg, it is often the
company’s capacity to respond
quickly to a dire need that leads
to a partnership that endures for decades.
“We can go to a mine at very short notice to
assist them when, for instance, they experience
a jaw crusher or secondary crusher failure that
brings production to a standstill,” says Janse
van Rensburg. “We can move onto site quickly
with a very large mobile crusher and keep pro-
duction going for the weeks or months that it
takes for a mine to get their own equipment
back into operation.”
B&E International’s ability to do this is
based not only on its engineering capability
– it designs, manufactures, commissions and
maintains crushing and washing plants for
external mining projects – but on its experience
of actually running these operations on behalf
of clients.
“What distinguishes us from other design
and engineering houses is that crushing and
screening is our business,” he says. “This is
what we do every day on the infrastructure
side of our operations, where we undertake
contracts using our own mobile or static plants,
crushing for large construction projects.”
So successful were the company’s initial
operations from 1972 in blasting and excavating
that it expanded into crushing and screening a
few years later, and entered the mining services
sector in 1993.
“We diversified into bulk mining, process-
ing and beneficiation of minerals, although
we do leave the final recovery stages to the
experts in the mining companies themselves,”
he says. “Our customers include South Africa’s
largest mining companies, and we mine about
22 million tonnes a year currently, while also
crushing, screening and processing about 12
million tonnes a year of ore and aggregates.”
Janse van Rensburg emphasises how the
first, short term contracts with many customers
have led to ongoing partnerships.
“We always start with assessing exactly
B&E provides short or long term
With over 40 years of experience in mobile and static
crushing plants, Raubex company B&E International is
known for its range of reliable interventions – from a stop-
gap mobile plant in an emergency to a long term crushing
solution on the mine site.
what is required, before making our propos-
als, so that we can design a plant that will
meet expectations,” he says. “While ensuring
the appropriate specifications for the output
needed, we are also very familiar with what the
practical maintenance requirements are going
to be and we design to make access easier and
maintenance quicker. This is just part of the
value to the customer that comes from running
our own plants.”
B&E International’s rare combination of engi-
neering capability and operational experience
even allows it to assume some of the start-up
risk faced by new mines, by designing a plant
and running it on a ‘toll’ basis for a customer.
“For a new mining operation that is just
starting up and which may not be able to
fully fund all its facilities, we can design and
actually run the plant on a ‘tonnage rate’ for
an agreed period of time,” says Janse van
Rensburg. “The plant’s efficient operation for,
say, six to twelve months will prove to the
mine that the plant can deliver in terms of the
parameters required and the mine can decide
on whether and when to take ownership based
on how its cash flow improves.”
The customer essentially pays for the amount
of material processed, without having to pay