Modern Mining Marchh 2017

MINING CONTRACTING

Aveng Moolmans’ West African operation. He was appointed MD of Aveng Moolmans in 2012 in succession to Brian Wilmot (who retired recently) and MD of the combined businesses in 2015. Detailing Aveng Mining’s recent successes, White says the first was the award of a 30-month contract for the mining of soft and hard over- burden and coal at South32’s Khutala colliery in Mpumalanga, which started in early October. “Hard on the heels of this, we were awarded a contract by Black Mountain Mining, a subsid- iary of Vedanta PLC, in December to undertake the bulk mining at the Gamsberg zinc project in the Northern Cape,” he says. “Our third success was registered earlier this year when Boteti Mining, a subsidiary of Lucara Diamond Corporation, appointed us to take over as the mining contractor at the Karowe diamond mine in Botswana – a mine which has become world famous due to the large number of large dia- monds it has produced.” When Modern Mining spoke to White in early March, both the Gamsberg and Karowe contracts were starting up. “In the case of Karowe, we’re ramping up over a two-month period from one to three teams,” he says. “Both contracts are of long duration – 44 months in the case of Gamsberg and 72 months in the case of Karowe. In terms of the volumes involved, Gamsberg is the bigger of the two – and big- ger than Khutala as well – and will require us to move 50,8 million bank cubic metres over the term of the contract. We’re deploying some substantial machines at Gamsberg to achieve this. The trucks will be 200-ton capacity Cat 789s while the main excavation tools are two Cat 6050 face shovels, which are 580-tonne class machines – the largest in our fleet.” White adds that the award of Karowe has ensured that Aveng Moolmans retains an active presence in Botswana. “We’ve been involved in Botswana since 2002 when we started min- ing for Tati Nickel near Francistown and we remained on this particular site until fairly recently when the mine ceased operations. We kept the Tati fleet in Botswana in anticipation of a further contract award and this has now transpired. The fleet that was at Tati has been moved to Karowe. In all, we’ll be deploying 30 Terex TR100 and Komatsu HD785 rigid trucks and three Cat 6030 face shovels at the mine.” Traditionally, Aveng Moolmans has derived about two thirds of its turnover from African countries outside of South Africa and over the years has worked throughout the Southern African region, in Tanzania and in several West African countries. Currently, however,

the balance has swung back in South Africa’s favour, which is now the source for about three quarters of Aveng Moolmans’ revenue. Says White: “We like to diversify on the basis of what we term the 5Cs – commodity, currency, climate, country and client. Broadly speaking, we are achieving this goal but we would like to do more outside of South Africa – but of course one has to follow the work.” In South Africa itself, Aveng Moolmans is operating not only at Khutala and Gamsberg but also at the Sishen iron ore mine, the Kolomela iron ore mine (where it is responsible for min- ing the Klipbankfontein pit) and the Tshipi manganese mine, all in the Northern Cape, and at the Nkomati JV nickel mine in Mpumalanga. “The concentration of work in the Northern Cape is interesting,” observes White. “Ten years ago we were very exposed to the Mpumalanga coalfields and took a conscious decision to reduce this dependence – with the result that we now have only the one coal contract in Mpumalanga. This is a market, incidentally, which attracts a large number of startups – small companies that have some plant and perceive coal mining as a low-cost entry point into contract mining. The result is that pricing is highly – in some cases, suicidally – com- petitive. We avoid this space. Having said this, many of the ‘blue chip’ coal mining companies look beyond price alone and place a value on partnering with large, well-resourced contrac- tors able to handle large volumes and to work to the highest standards of safety. Obviously, we’re very comfortable working with coal min- ing clients of this type.” Outside of South Africa (and apart from Karowe), Aveng Moolmans is currently

A fully laden Cat 785C belonging to Aveng Moolmans at work at the Nkomati nickel mine.

“We like to diversify on the basis of what we term the 5Cs – commodity, currency, climate, country and client.”

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March 2017  MODERN MINING  37