PATTERN EXPANSION UTILISING TITAN® RED AT YARRIE IRON ORE MINE IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

摘要

The Yarrie Iron Ore mine is located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia some 200km east-southeast of Port Hedland, the closest large regional centre. The mine is owned by BHPIO who has contracted a large Australian mining contractor Roche Bros to be responsible for the total mining, crushing and trainloading functions. This paper describes a drill and blast optimisation program resulting from the introduction of a new emulsion matrix called Titan® Red used to manufacture both HANFO and pumped emulsion ANFO blends.The main strategy used to implement the drill and blast optimisation study involved the use of team work and only changing one parameter at a time by a small increment across entire patterns. A benchmark (with the change) blast is fired first to enable an initial assessment followed by a number of verification blasts to confirm the results across an entire rock type range.The utilisation of the above strategy not only reduces risk but enables the drill and blast optimisation to progress in a logical controlled manner. The 27% average reduction in powder factor achieved in this study arose from significant pattern expansions across all rock types which resulted in both reduced drilling and explosive costs. This has been achieved even though excavation, haulage and crushing rates have either improved or remained static whilst unit maintenance costs have been reduced.