Mogalakwena — Pre-Feasibility Study for Concentrator Expansion

The Mogalakwena mine is a large open pit mine located in South Africa that produces a variety of products, including platinum group elements, gold, copper and nickel.

Anglo American required a pre-feasibility study to evaluate the expansion of current concentrating capacities on site.

This involved the development of a complex integrated model that could reflect the numerous processing paths on site, number of off-site downstream smelting and refining constraints, and revenue streams from the various payable elements.

IMC Mining, in conjunction with the client, developed a holistic model that tracked the flow of material through the entire process from pit to port and could make dynamic decisions to drive value.

The model was developed using linear and nonlinear programming optimisation software that was multi-mine and multi-destination and considered all revenue streams and cost centres.

Over a thousand individual modelling scenarios were run to ensure all possible permutations were analysed.

IMC was able to demonstrate to the client the most value-adding options for increasing concentration capacity on site, while balancing the mine's output with other sites owned by the client in the same region.

Recommendations of focus areas were provided for key downstream smelting and refining processes that could become bottlenecks in the future, to improve overall business value.