The only bad thing I don't like from this news article of our Tungsten mine is this, this will be a major Tungsten mine in around 12 months time........not a tin mine as such!
I love the aerial shot of our mine site, as it gives you a real overhead view of the work being carried out, at our Tungsten mine.
THIS stunning aerial image shows how Plymouth's new metal mine looks as work hits the half-way point.
The £130million mine at Hemerdon is the first to built in the UK for 45 years.
Wolf Minerals are building Drakelands, which will produce tungsten and tin, with a view to it opening next summer. When in full production it will create about 200 direct jobs and pump hundreds of millions of pounds into the local economy. Around 350 people people are working on the site at the moment.
The construction phase is already generating significant economic benefits with an estimated 70 per cent of the £75million cost of the process plant being spent with UK companies, many of those in Devon and Cornwall.
Jeff Harrison, Wolf Minerals UK operations manager, said: “We are very pleased with progress on both the mine site and the process plant elements of the project and we remain on schedule to complete construction early next year followed by commissioning of the process plant and then starting production in the third quarter of 2015.
“In addition to the construction activities on site we are also continuing to work closely with the local community and we have been pleased to host some 200 people from the local parish councils and surrounding villages on a series of site tours recently.”
Extensive work has taken place since groundbreaking for the project was held in March 2014, with highlights of construction to date including the demolition of the pre-existing Second World War plant completed, major earthworks to construct haul roads, screening bunds, rainwater catch-pits and prepare the site of the mine pit and process plant.
Concrete works to the process plant is also virtually complete and more than a third of the structural steel erection has been now carried out. In addition more than 95 per cent of process plant equipment has been delivered to the site and work is well under way on its installation.
Meanwhile a major crane lift saw the installation of a 30 tonne ‘scrubber screen’, built by Don Valley Engineering, in Sheffield, which will be used to separate rock and ore material as part of the processing plant.
Construction is also well advanced on phase one of the mine waste facility and major environmental works have been carried out including new bridleways, three bat ‘hotels’, bat boxes, eel passes, and the planting of 30,000 trees.
The Hemerdon project is the third largest tungsten and tin resource in the world and will provide a secure supply of tungsten – which is regarded as a critical mineral by the UK, US and EU - and valuable export revenue for the UK.
With an estimated production of 5,000 tonnes per annum of tungsten concentrate and 1,000 tonnes of tin concentrate, the Drakelands Mine will be one of the world’s most important tungsten mines, producing about 3.5 per cent of forecast world demand for tungsten in 2016.
Earlier this month Wolf Minerals announced that it had completed a six hole diamond drilling programme around the pit perimeter to provide additional geotechnical information to optimize the slope angles for the open pit.
The drilling results indicate that an additional 4 to 6 million tonnes of ore may be available to be mined from the project and that there is the potential to increase ore reserves by 15 to 23 per cent, as a result of steepening the open pit walls and broadening the open pit perimeter within the existing planning permission.
Subject to a change in the planning permission’s open pit boundary, to allow access to the Southern Extension, there may also be the potential to increase the ore reserves further.
Plymouth's new tin mine from the sky - £130m project is half-way there
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