Reviving Mine Operations with New Lab Information Management Technology: New Century Mine, Australia
Recently, Dion Borg, General Manager, CCLAS at Datamine completed a 7 day site visit to New Century Mine, which is located at Lawn Hill, 250km North-West of Mount Isa in Queensland, Australia.
New Century process an average of 475,000tpa Zinc concentrate and 50,000tpa Lead concentrate. The product is transferred in slurry form via a 304km underground pipeline to the port facility at Karumba for shipping to smelters in Australia, Europe and Asia.
as well as Dion Borg (Centre)
The production laboratory runs a 24/7, 12Hr roster from 6am to 6pm and is staffed by 8 Chemists/Technicians, 2 Coordinators and 1 Systems Chemist, CCCLAS had been installed for Oz Minerals (formerly Zinifex) Century Mine since 1999. The laboratory was upgraded to CCLAS EL in Feb 2006, with further enhancements in 2008.
In 2009, MMG bought the mine from Oz Minerals, but in late 2015 or processing was ceased and the mine went into rehabilitation. In 2017 the mine was purchased by New Century Resources with production beginning in August 2018, as new technology has been employed to allow them to process their tailings for Zinc and Lead.
Dion’s visit to the New Century mine laboratory consisted of CCLAS training and enhancements of their current CCLAS configuration. Along with the integration to their new Horiba Laser Particle Size Analyser and XRF Flux Weigher.
CCLAS EL automates laboratory processes through flexible sample registration, barcode label printing, work list generation, online data capture from a wide range of analytical instruments, and automatic generation of analytical reports and commercial invoices. The system offers superior quality control functions that monitor operation product materials and quality control reference standards against specifications.
CCLAS EL enables high-volume, complex analytical laboratory data to be captured, calculated and stored with utmost confidence and reported to the client efficiently and on time.
It is in use by major mining companies, commercial testing and wastewater laboratories worldwide, across a wide range of operations, from simple standalone systems through to complex multi-site systems.
Connect with Dion Borg, General Manager, CCLAS on LinkedIn or submit an enquiry via our Contact page.
