Century mine

I got to go up to Century Mine a few weeks ago. Century produces the second most amount of zinc in the world, and used to be the second biggest open cut pit in the world. Nowadays it has to settle for the biggest in Australia. It's about 240 kilometres north west of Mount Isa, but it's a fly-in fly-out operation, which I did for the day!

It all came together because of the trip I took to Lawn Hill. The minister's plane I was on landed at Century Mine and I met the PR person who I exchanged cards with. She asked if I wanted to go up there and who can say no to that!

I flew out of Isa at 6am, which meant I had to be at the airport at 5.30am. I seem to be flying around in Beechcraft planes a lot, it was a King Air and took about 40 minutes.

I had a tour of the village where the workers live. It's a pretty good set-up, and feels a little like a school camp. There's a big dining room, a pub, a gym, a pool, tennis, volley ball and basketball courts, barbecues... whatever really.

From the village it was to the Mine Administration Centre a few kilometres down the road. I spent the rest of the morning holding a lot of interviews with trainees and trainers. I also talked to the General Manager and a few other people.

But in the afternoon I got to have a tour of the pit. Here's a composite panorama I made from the lookout at the top. From here, the trucks on the road look like toys!

We were driving down the pit in a Toyota Landcruiser, which ordinarily one would say is a pretty solid vehicle. It felt, very, very tiny going down. It became very apparent the trucks were far from toys.

The bottom was very interesting. You can kind of see it here, but a scoop is putting rock in a truck while another one waits. It's not ore at this point, it's overburden rock. They have been getting ore out, but eventually they will hit very rich ore with no overburden and make a motza.

We went up and over to another part of the pit where nothing was happening at that point. They stagger the pit because it's stronger to have walls like that and it's also safer because if there's a slippage hopefully some of it is stopped on one of the levels.

They also drill holes into the walls to let out water. They have dug into a natural water table and it's safer to let the water out in a controlled way than let it build up. You can see in this photo the stains on the wall from water coming out.

After coming out of the pit I had a tour of the rest of the side. This is a pile of crushed ore that has come up the conveyor belt from the crusher. From the pit the ore is dumped, then scooped into a smaller truck, tipped into the crusher and then it ends up in this pile.

From this pile, it goes through a little hole which is below this pile onto another conveyor belt. It does this to give a consistent feed of ore, and goes into the concentrator, which is probably 100 metres away.

In the concentrator the ore is turned to slurry and then pumped 304 kilometres in a pipeline to Karumba. It's put on a special flat-bottomed transport ship and then taken out into the Gulf of Carpentraia to be put on an export ship.

I think the pipeline is a really interesting way to move it. Although, last year the pipeline broke, which caused more than a little bit of trouble for the mine!

After the pit tour it was time to fly home. It was a pretty long day but I learnt a lot. I wrote up a fair bit of content for the paper so hopefully it was worth it for my editor. Oh yeh, and the food was great!