Food for thought;
2Mtpa? That's almost 5,500 tonnes, every day of a year.
Logistics: How many truckloads is that to get it into a plant?
A Cat 797F would do it in 16 runs, doable, cool
Although that might be a big freakin truck for startup, maybe a few a 3rd of the size.
What does that equate to when you're talking about a ~4m wide strip of resource?
Lets say we wanted to go 10m deep on first pass, the easiest stuff. That's pretty much a V shape, 10m deep by ~10m across at the top (push overburden aside?), ~55 degree sides (too steep probably), edge of DOF traveling down one side of the V.
That's 137.5m long to get your 5,500t. Probably doable, but you'd use up 10km of strike in just over 2 months.
Probably not the way to go, need deeper earlier...how many diggers would you want in a 137.5m stretch?
Not many I'd think...maybe x multiple sites to share the love, but x multiple diggers required.
Just my pondering's.
(20min delay)