Master Drilling’s Mobile Tunnel Borer heads to Anglo’s Mogalakwena mine
Master Drilling is readying its Mobile Tunnel Borer (MTB)
technology for a contract at Anglo American Platinum’s Mogalakwena mine in
South Africa.
The company, which revealed the news during its interim
results presentation, said on-boarding for this project deployment was
underway, with the start of “decline excavation” due by the end of the year.
Anglo American Platinum said in its own interim results
recently that it was working on feasibility studies on the future of
Mogalakwena, with completion of these studies expected at the end of 2021.
Decisions on the pathway forward are expected shortly after this, however, one
of the current key milestones at the asset includes progressing an underground
exploration decline.
Master Drilling Executive Director, Koos Jordaan, said
during the presentation that the contract with Anglo American Platinum is for a
“turnkey operation” with Master Drilling providing capabilities in terms of
construction, logistics and project management, in addition to its normal
excavation services.
The MTB is a modular horizontal cutting machine equipped
with full-face cutter head with disc cutters adapted from traditional tunnel
boring machines. Unlike these traditional machines, it is designed to work both
on inclines and declines, with the ability to navigate around corners and
construct 5.5 m diameter decline access tunnels.
One MTB unit was previously scheduled to carry out a 1.4 km
project at Northam Platinum’s Eland platinum group metals operation in South
Africa, however this was cancelled in March 2020 due to the pandemic. This
deployment followed testing of an MTB unit in soft rock at a quarry just
outside of Rome, Italy, in 2018.
Alongside news of this latest MTB deployment, Master
Drilling said in its results that it was studying the potential to deploy two
of these MTB units in tandem for twin-decline access as part of the
technology’s second-generation developments.
“We can already see the benefit of utilising two of these
machines to do a twin-decline access to an orebody,” Jordaan said.
Looking to vertical developments, Master Drilling reported
that it had received shareholder funding approval from the Industrial
Development Corporation for the latest work on its Shaft Boring System (SBS),
designed to sink 4.5 m diameter shafts in hard rock down to 1,500 m depths.
IM witnessed the main cutting mechanism of what was
previously billed as being a 45-m long, 450-t machine at the back end of 2019.
The company has since said it will introduce a “smaller
scope system” as part of its introduction to the industry.
While busy on the latest slimmed down design of the SBS, Master
Drilling has signed a letter of intent with a prospective South Africa project
that could see a machine start sinking activities in the first half of 2022,
Jordaan said.
Outside of these developments, Master Drilling reported on
several contract awards across the globe, including a three-year raiseboring
extension with AngloGold Ashanti in Brazil, a joint venture agreement with
Besalco Construction to work on Codelco’s Chuquicamata copper mine, an executed
contract with Glencore’s Raglan mine in Canada, an agreement with Zimplats in
Zimbabwe and a “long-term contract” on the Khoemacau copper-silver project in
Botswana.
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