Brilliant prospects...
.POLYCOM® high-pressure grinding rolls in an Indonesian mine.
West Papua is the western half of New Guinea, the second largest island of the world. It has more raw material deposits than most of the other of the Indonesian provinces. Its 2.4 million inhabitants speak 269 different languages. The traditional Melanesian people call themselves Papua. The last remaining intact tropical rainforest of Asia provides shelter for the largest biodiversity outside of the Amazonas region. Apart from glaciers that are more than 4,000 m high, rich copper deposits as well as the world's largest gold mine can be found here.
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Feed material for POLYCOM® high-pressure grinding rolls. |
The deposit was discovered by a Dutch geologist in 1936 when he tried to climb the Jayawijaya mountains. At a height of 3,700 m, he spotted an approx. 130-m high, tooth-shaped and strikingly black mountain composed of auriferous copper ore, which he called »Ertsberg« (Dutch for »ore mountain«), in an otherwise light limestone mountain landscape. Situated in an almost inaccessible valley high up in the mountains and 120 km from the coast, this copper deposit seemed like a »mountain made of gold on the moon«.
Due to the Second World War, his notes sank into oblivion, to be found again some twenty years later. In 1975 open pit mining commenced. Then, in 1988, mining was started two kilometres away from the »Ertsberg« at a height of 4,270 m where a deposit of more than a billion tonnes of ore with high contents of copper and ore was found. Since that time, PT Freeport Indonesia owns a mine that comprises the world's largest gold deposit.
As the use of POLYCOM® high-pressure grinding rolls in the gold ore and copper ore mining industry introduced a sea change in technology, the Indonesian company, too, has opted for this technology.
Since the middle of 2007, two POLYCOM® grinding rolls have been used for breaking gold ore and copper ore in West Papua. The POLYCOM® rolls are equipped with hard metal studs and are hence ideally suited for breaking highly abrasive copper ore efficiently and at low costs. Equipped with two 1,800-kW motors of variable speed, a POLYCOM® breaks 1,500 tonnes of ore per hour.
A large number of Polysius machines are in very effective operation in different sectors of the minerals industry - and the POLYCOM® success story has hardly begun.