Modern Mining January 2023

SAWS will be responsible for operating and main taining the infrastructure. “The Radar system will detect weather activities beyond the borders of South Africa into Botswana and Zimbabwe, where several of the tropical storms emanate. As a miner with a massive open-pit operation, there is potential to gather much of the stormwater in the open pit catchment area. However, mud-rush is an associated risk and it is therefore essential that we are prepared for potential storm occurrences and, if we are armed with information on the size and magnitude of an incoming storm, we can respond accordingly,” says Rodel. Energy efficiency at VUP Aligned with Anglo American in advancing the adoption of green energy initiatives, De Beers has

earmarked 60 MW of renewable power for Venetia Mine and is already considering transitioning its fleet from diesel to battery electric vehicles and implementing a number of energy saving initiatives, including Vent on Demand (VoD), a system that determines the ventilation requirement for each area and controls this automatically. “Given that the various areas of the mining opera tion have different ventilation needs, the VoD system analyses the requirement for each area according to the number of people and equipment in use, and allocates the required amount of ventilation, thereby reducing the overall energy consumption deployed at the mine. Based on our studies we know we need to ventilate between 7 and 10 areas at any point in time – at least three have high ventilation require ments while three need medium levels of ventilation

Infrastructure advancements include the completion of pump stations.

Top projects

January 2023  MODERN MINING  27