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NGWENYA IRON ORE MINE TARGETS 2 000 TONNES DAILY

18/09/2022 15:56:00 Welcome Dlamini

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MBABANE – Mwelase Mining Eswatini, the company that has revived and is now operating the Ngwenya Iron Ore Mine, is now closer to commencing with business.

Once the mine gets into gear, the target is to transport at least 2 000 tonnes of iron ore a day, using at least 35 trucks. For this to be possible, each truck will make two trips a day from the mine to Mpaka or another venue that is going to be disclosed at a later stage of the operations. This is according to Mwelase Mining Eswatini Project Leader Leon Fanoe.

follow the same process

He disclosed that the previous company was able to ship about three million tonnes and Mwelase Mining would follow the same process and their target was to reclaim 150 000 tonnes of the iron dumps per month. “We have refurbished the plant to reclaim about 150 000 tonnes per month, that is in the first phase. We will put the 150 000 tonnes through the plant and from that we get the good stuff, which is about 60 000 tonnes, which contains plus or minus 60 per cent iron. The 90 000 tonnes goes back to the waste dump area as discard,” he further explained. He said they were going to ramp up their operations every month and hoped that by January 2022 they would get to fully operational phase, which will be the ability to reclaim 150 000 tonnes of the iron ore dumps per month.

For the long-term, Fanoe said they were busy with the prospecting licence, so they would do some geological drilling meant to determine the quality and quantity of iron ore still to be mined. He said this process was expected to take at least a year and then once they understood the extent of the quality and quantity of the iron ore, they would do proper planning in terms of production and then plant capacity in future. “The ultimate goal is to operate a fully fledged iron ore mine,” he said. He highlighted that in terms of what was still available on the dumps, specifically in the area they were presently focusing on, there was about nine million tonnes of iron ore material.

dump in the mine

Fanoe said the whole dump in the mine was basically over 30 million tonnes but was divided into three areas. “The area we are targeting is the one with the highest iron content, which is the nine million tonnes. The other has 15 million tonnes and another about five million tonnes. This one we’re targeting has about 40 and 44 per cent iron content and then we beneficiate that up to the 60 per cent by putting it through the plant. When we put it through the plant we beneficiate it; we make it better. Then the quality of the iron ore goes up to 60 per cent,” he said. The project leader said all the trucks that will be engaged to transport the iron ore material will need to strictly comply with road worthiness standards to avoid the traffic accidents that had become a common occurrence with the previous company. “The second measure we will introduce is that the transportation will not be done during peak hours, in other words, in the morning during certain hours there will be no trucks on the road and then late in the afternoon for certain hours the trucks will also not be on the road,” he said.

Fanoe said to ensure that this does not affect productivity, they would make it a point that more trucks were on the road in the period that is not peak time. There were also complaints about the previous company, in that trucks carrying the iron ore material would dirty the roads because of spillage, but the Mwelase Mining project leader has given assurance that things would be different with them. “In the past, the company that was operating here was using the Slimes Plant on the other side of the highway and there they produced a very fine product that was wet and that actually sipped onto the road. So, we’re not going to use that plant anymore. That product, because of being very fine and more wet, couldn’t be contained efficiently. What we will do is that once the truck goes out, it will be weighed, wheels washed and tarpaulin will be placed to cover the load. Our product is more like crush as opposed to the more fine and more wet one,” he said.

He said they further hoped to run the plant more efficiently in terms of putting better equipment than what was there before, such that they could do more with less equipment for more efficiency. “The plant has also been designed to have less spillage because that was a big problem as there was spillage of material and water. On the crushing and screening side, it was previously a dry process and it generated a lot of dust; although it is still a dry process, we will put a Dust Suppression System to contain the dust,” Fanoe said.

contaminating water

Another concern that existed previously among residents of Ngwenya was that the mine was contaminating water to an extent that tap water in households was no longer fit for human consumption. Fanoe said they had greatly reduced the amount of water that would make its way from the mine into the local stream that supplies the locals with water. He said they had also constructed what is known as settlement dams. “We have settlement dams which will be cleaned and we will be monitoring the quality of the water at different stages. Previously, the water was not recycled and a lot of it ran down into the stream. What we’re doing now is that the water can’t run down into the stream because we keep it in the plant. If it rains, we channel that water into the settlement dams (rain water or storm water), so there are two water sources,” he said.

Explaining the previous activity on the mine, Fanoe said the operation originated in the 1960s and 197s0s when Anglo mined the iron ore reserves there but just took the very good stuff, and the rest of the stuff was put on dumps. He said these were the dumps that were available to re-mine. “So we reclaim that material and then we bring it through the plant. The previous company did the same thing – they reclaimed the material, put it through the plant and shipped it for export. You take the material from the dumps, put it through the plant then you get a better product like 60 per cent iron, then that’s product you can sell,” Fanoe added.