|
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.
|
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.
|
