Germany’s Chancellor plans lithium deal with Serbia after Rio ruling
Olaf Scholz plans to visit Serbia this week to secure supplies of lithium that are critical for the nation’s energy transition and auto industry.
Cementation started up its U.S. division only six years ago but has established itself as one of the finest underground engineering, development and production contractors in the western part of the country. Now part of the Murray & Roberts group, Cementation brings to its North and South American clients the best practices from a global network of sister companies.
The company has increased four-fold since establishing its offices in Salt Lake City. Its current employee roster numbers about 400. Contracts include mine development, personnel training and various underground installation and construction projects such as shaft sinking, Alimak raising and ore pass and dump construction.
Cementation’s U.S. president, Mike Nadon, said the steady growth means he is always on the lookout for the best equipment he can acquire to meet requirements of new jobs and to keep his company competitive in the bidding process.
Cementation found a way to increase quality and reduce time with one of the newest and most highly automated face drills, the Atlas Copco Boomer M2 C. Though some have acquired drill rigs with similar capabilities, Cementation is the first company to fully utilize Total Station navigation in conjunction with Tunnel Manager drilling software to perform completely automated drilling, in a gold mine in this case.
Cementation Drilling Supervisor Mike McMillan said he was impressed that it wasn’t difficult to learn.
Atlas Copco provided training for use of the systems. McMillan said he could use the program after just one day. Within the course of two months he had completed all the drill programing for the tunnel, all on his own: “I consider it a huge testament to the system that a guy like me can use it.”
McMillan said using Tunnel Manager and the Total Station navigation system has been saving Cementation untold amounts of time on the decline project he is currently working on. The job is to complete a 20-by-20-foot access with an 8-degree decline to more than 8,000 feet with a total vertical depth of roughly 1,000 feet.
Using the Tunnel Manager program, McMillan lays out the drilling patterns. The program lets him include information such as tunnel profile, position coordinates, tunnel line and even the driller’s name for each round.
When it comes time to drill he sets out a tripod with the Total Station receiver, or Power Tracker, mounted on it. The station triangulates with fixed points installed on the tunnel wall to calculate position in three dimensions.
The operator inserts the Tunnel Manager file into the rig from a memory stick. The 32-hole perimeter of the total 72-hole pattern is drilled by the operator in “semiautomatic mode,” so that the operator can be certain everything is going to plan. If not, the driller can quickly intercede to make corrections as he notes any deviation during drilling.
Since the drilling is so precisely recorded, and since corrections are inputted immediately and in such small increments, the process is not interrupted by having engineers measure and calculate corrections and lay out patterns in paint for every round. Delay between rounds is minimized, and more time is spent drilling.
He said the company has been making 14-foot advances in their current underground mine with 1.75-inch diameter ballistic carbide bits, placing holes in the pattern about 24 inches apart. Rate of penetration has been averaging 3 meters per minute.
