Modern Mining December 2016

BULK MATERIALS HANDLING

A string of new contracts boosts

ELB Engineering Services (ELB), part of the JSE-listed ELB Group Limited, has reinforced its reputation as a leading provider of bulk materials handling and mineral processing solutions, with a number of recent contract awards which are collectively worth several billion rand and which guarantee it a healthy workload for at least the next two years. Modern Mining recently spoke to Dr Stephen Meijers, CEO of ELB Engineering Services, about the company’s extraordinary run of success.

changer’ and says it is the culmination of many months of hard work by ELB in close collabora- tion with the BMM/Vedanta team. “Gamsberg is one of the biggest ‘greenfield’ mining projects currently underway in Southern Africa and we’re very excited to be part of it and playing such a pivotal role,” he says. “We won the con- tract – which consists of three separate work packages – in the face of intense competition and it will certainly rank as one of the biggest beneficiation engineering projects we’ve ever undertaken.” He adds that the process plant will incor- porate cutting-edge staged flotation reactor technology from Canada’s Woodgrove Technologies, a company with whom ELB has a long-standing co-operation agreement, and that it will also be assisted in the execution of the contract by another international partner, ENFI, one of China’s leading engineering companies operating in the non-ferrous metals field. ELB’s participation in Gamsberg will be through its Engineered Technologies division, which specialises in the design and construction of process plants and supporting infrastructure. “We set up this division several years ago in order to diversify our service offering and it’s been a real success,” says Meijers. “So far we’ve operated mainly in coal, chrome, manganese

T he biggest of the new contracts is for the provision of Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) services to Black Mountain Mining (BMM), the Vedanta Zinc subsidiary which is developing the US$400 million Gamsberg zinc project near Aggeneys in the Northern Cape. The project involves the establishment of an open-pit mine at Gams- berg, as well as a 4 Mt/a zinc concentrator plant and associated infrastructure, including bulk water and power supplies. ELB will es- sentially be responsible for building the con- centrator and the water and power infrastruc- ture and anticipates being on site for around 20 months. Meijers describes the contract as a ‘company

Dr Stephen Meijers (right), CEO of ELB Engineering Services, with Alistair McKay, Business Development Executive: Africa.

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32  MODERN MINING  December 2016