Technical Aspects Regarding the Opening of a New Mine with Old Already-Existing Equipment

The decision of opening a new mine is a rather complicated investment project evaluation, including too many separate stages of decision making. Equipment selection is one of them. This article deals with the technical aspects regarding the opening of a new mine with old and already-existing equipment. A case study in the Greek, surface-mined, bucket wheel excavator (BWE) lignite operations is presented. The new Mavropigi Mine will be opened with the (gradually mined out) North Field Mine and Komanos Mine BWEs. Issues examined include the establishment of borehole evaluation criteria, modeling of the deposit, estimation of both geological and minable reserves, calculation of the rate-of-recovery and assessment of the run-off-mine lignite quality, investigation of a new BWE type, investigation of the present status of the old existing equipment, and considerations for selecting another type of continuously-selective mining equipment.

Keywords:

• Greece
• Macedonia
• lignite surface mining
• bucket wheel excavator, selective mining
• evaluation of equipment