KGHM International putting ‘next-gen’ thinking to work at Victoria project
KGHM International’s Victoria project is looking to achieve what the Onaping Depth mine had previously planned in the Sudbury Basin: to build a modern mine that leverages a fully battery-electric underground fleet.
The Victoria project has consistently been spoken of for the last few years as a rare greenfield asset in the middle of this Canadian mining hub.
IM sought out Steve Dunlop, General Manager for Canada and Head of North American Exploration, and Serge Tousignant, Technical Services and Commercial Manager for the Victoria Project, to find out more about these aims.
Dual-purpose shaft
Victoria looks set to be a 3,500 t/d copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, gold and silver operation producing around 1.2 Mt/y of mill feed that will be transported to a third party for further off-site processing.
At these rates and with the currently defined resource, this puts its mine life at 14 years.
Victoria is set to go down just below circa-2,000 m below surface, putting it in the same bracket as several other deep mines in the Sudbury Basin.
Both a production and ventilation shaft will be sunk from surface, with DMC Mining, a company within the KGHM Group, currently engaged with the latter through the Advanced Exploration Project.
Dunlop explained: “Right now, that resource goes from approximately 1,175 m to 2,150 m. We’re currently sitting at 1,484.2 m below surface as of yesterday (July 6). We’ve just finished the 1400 level horizontal excavation, putting us about midway through our advanced exploration phase.”
This advanced exploration phase is seeing DMC Mining and KGHM International not only sink a 6.7-m diameter shaft – to act as the mine’s ventilation shaft in the future – but carry out concurrent exploration with a diamond drill rig at stations approximately every 200 m down from the 1200 level.
Dunlop added: “The ventilation shaft is planned to go to 1,860 m and, over that advanced exploration phase, we’re looking to drill just under 60,000 m of drilling to expand the resource as well as convert inferred tonnes to indicated and measured categories.”
At the 1,800 m level, KGHM International also plans to take a bulk sample that it can send to a third-party mill for processing, getting an early read on the concentrate quality. The 7.6-m diameter production shaft, to be sunk after a final investment decision, will go down below the 2,000 m mark.
The advanced exploration phase KGHM International is currently carrying out with DMC Mining is expected to continue until approximately mid-2028.
Advancing next-gen plans
It is not just the exploration phase that is advanced and forward-thinking.
After speaking to Dunlop and Tousignant, it was easy to see how advanced the planning for the project’s next generation fleet was.
In terms of electric vehicles, Tousignant said the overall mine design philosophy was geared towards using a full battery-electric fleet.
“We’ve undertaken a lot of studies related to ventilation and cooling, comparing the BEVs with the baseline diesel equipment, and the BEVs stack up well,” he said. “We’re able to reduce the cubic metres per minute of required ventilation substantially with these BEVs, plus lower our cooling demand, which, at circa-2,000 m below surface, would have been significant with a diesel-powered fleet.”
By using a BEV fleet in the mine modelling, the company was able to focus on a surface-based ventilation system as opposed to a hybrid where cooled air would be pushed down from surface and cooled at another point in the underground mine.
“It’s also been demonstrated through the industry that BEVs can provide improved productivity over diesel equipment when comparing apples with apples, so that benefit is also being incorporated in our models,” Tousignant said, adding that TCO costs also looked lower than the diesel-powered vehicle comparison.
“In Sudbury, we can rely on strong OEM support within the vicinity of Victoria, so we’ve been working with these players to incorporate that data into our studies,” he said.
In addition to those manufacturers with bases in or near to Sudbury, the Victoria team has been tapping into the wider KGHM group for input on this front, with Tousignant confirming that KGHM ZANAM S.A., the principal equipment supplier to KGHM Polska Miedź S.A., has also provided specs for the in-development LH14e 14-t payload battery-electric underground loader.
This future battery-electric fleet will also include automation, according to Tousignant.
“Being that Victoria is a greenfield project, it has the advantage of designing infrastructure and systems from the ground up to accommodate emerging technologies rather than trying to retrofit them into an existing operation,” he said. “So, our approach at this point is to adopt proven and commercially validated technologies that deliver measurable improvements in efficiency, safety and cost performance.”
“Yet, at the same time, our project timeline provides flexibility to incorporate further technology advancements as they become production ready.”
The automation vision is automating LHDs from stopes to ore passes, automating the material rehandling systems and automation of underground rock breakers, Tousignant said. There is also likely to be some equipment controlled from surface in high-risk areas, including production drills and loaders – both development and production – which will also help reduce ventilation requirements through the ventilation on demand system Victoria is looking to incorporate.
Tying all this together will be a “robust, scalable communication network,” Tousignant said, adding that both LTE and Wi-Fi technologies are being evaluated as part of a hybrid approach that can provide “seamless coverage, flexibility for future expansion and cost-effective implementation.”
Even though the project is yet to move into the official development stage, the work that has been carried out on the project implies just how committed the mine owners are to realising this next-generation mining vision.
Dunlop concluded: “Our intention to build a ‘next-generation’ mine benefitting from increased levels of automation and the latest battery-electric vehicles. We’re very proud of the team and the coordination with our partners – not only with DMC Mining, but with our community, our Indigenous Partners, and with the wider company.
“We’ve already seen a tremendous commitment from all involved in terms of moving this project forward, and we’ve also been very involved with the Ontario government in terms of helping provide future opportunities for the project as well. It is these collaborations that continue to drive the project forward.”
The post KGHM International putting ‘next-gen’ thinking to work at Victoria project appeared first on International Mining.