MechChem Africa September-October 2023

BBE: SA’s Olympian mine ventilation and cooling specialist

MechChem Africa talks to Richard Gundersen of BBE Group, a world leading and independent engineering consultancy for mine ventilation and cooling solutions. With over 30 years of design and development experience, BBE Group has been involved in many of the deepest and most challenging mine ventilation, cooling and heating projects in the world. T he two men who started BBE in 1989, Stephen Bluhm and Rod Burton, came from the Chamber of Mines Research Organisation “They detected the need for a client consul tancy to help mining companies resolve the challenging issues of deep mine ventilation, which they were unable to offer from within COMRO. So in 1989, they formed Bluhm Burton Engineering (BBE) as an independent engineering consultancy specifically for mine ventilation and cooling,” BBE Group director, Richard Gundersen, tells MechChem Africa. “Then, in the late 1990s, the mining indus try embarked on a genuinely industry-wide research project called DeepMine, which was set up to explore the feasibility of mining at depths of between 4 000 and 5 000 m,” says, Gundersen. (COMRO). They were key researchers on the ventilation and cooling aspects of hot mines. But towards the end of the 1980s,

“This was a huge project, involving CSIR MiningTech (previously COMRO), mining houses, universities and consultancies. Initially I was involved through Gold Fields, where I was a consulting engineer, and I joined BBE during the course of this investigation. Basically, DeepMine was about identifying the showstoppers for mining at these depths: the costs, the power involved, safety and, of course, in our case, the technologies for ventilation and cooling. “Mining down to 5 000 metres was found to be viable, but nobody needed to go there yet. We ended up with tables of metal-price thresholds that would be needed for financial viability, along with a lot of insight into the technologies and solutions we would need to develop and apply,” he continues. South Africa, through COMRO, the DeepMine Project and other initiatives, con tinued its dominance in mining research into ventilation and cooling in deep level, narrow reef mining and deep block cave mining in the diamond and copper industries. “South Africa has deep and hot mines with challenging ventilation and cooling is sues. BBE has since kept developing this core expertise and is now over 30 years old. Our founding members have some 100 years of direct collective experience in cooling and ventilating mines – in South Africa, across Africa and in every continent of the world apart from Antarctica,” he adds. Gundersen’s work in the ventilation and cooling field for Gold Fields put him in close contact with BBE and he joined them in 1999. “When the platinum and coal mines were un bundled from Gold Fields, my colleagues invit ed BBE to bring my project engineering and a colleague’s civil engineering experience to the company to help them build an extension to the refrigeration plant at Northam Platinum. So we put a project team together and estab lished BBE Projects, with Northam Platinum’s cooling plant being our first success.

Coleman plant nearing completion. All major structures and equipment is installed and the contractor is adding finishing touches before commissioning.

Vale’s Coleman mine’s 10.5 MW cooling plant in Sudbury, Ontario under construction, showing the cast concrete, the chillers delivered and the condenser cooling towers under construction.

24 ¦ MechChem Africa • September-October 2023