JOB REPORT

Explosive success, no explosives needed.

Mining bauxite in Guinea, West Africa

Bauxite is an ore consisting mainly of aluminium minerals and iron oxides. The West African country of Guinea is one of the main producers of bauxite, surpassed only by Australia and Brazil. The country’s bauxite deposits are estimated to be around 10 billion tons. That’s nearly 50% of the total world reserves.

The owner of Debele Mine needed to find an alternative to blasting for mining the deposits of bauxite in the Tsentralnaya ore body, for power transmission lines, a public road, as well as a railway line running in the immediate vicinity precluded blasting operations. Surface miners from Wirtgen were the ideal candidates for extracting the bauxite in these difficult operation conditions.

Over a period of nine and a half months and 3,000 operating hours, a 2100 SM surface miner from Wirtgen mined around 300,000 tons of bauxite, equalling an average 300 tons per hour. One year later, a 2200 SM surface miner from Wirtgen commenced work in the Tsentralnaya ore body. Just three months later, the machine had already successfully mined a total quantity of 95,000 tons of bauxite and 20,000 tons of overburden.

Both surface miners worked in space-restricted conditions in an area of some 100 to 160 m in length and 35 to 55 m in width. They worked at an average production rate of around 250 tons per hour, depending on the hardness of the material to be mined. Altogether, nearly one million tons of bauxite was mined with this non-blasting mining method.