The Bougainville copper concentrator: A retrospective - part 2

Last year was the 20th anniversary of the closure of The Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL) mine in Papua New Guinea, due to civil unrest. As stated in the introduction to part one of this article (The AusIMM Bulletin, October 2009) the operation broke new ground in terms of the size and design of the initially installed equipment, served as a major testing ground for new and innovative equipment (heavy duty crushers, large cyclones and slurry pumps, wraparound motors, large flotation cells, Davcra and column cells, high rate thickening and pressure filtration) and operating and maintenance practices (fine crushing plant operation, scalping and secondary milling of coarse particles, preconcentration screening, ball mill liner change out and condition monitoring). Part one of this retrospective covered crushing, grinding and flotation. In this second part Nick Clarke and Peter Tilyard discuss tailings dewatering, preconcentrationscreening, gold metallurgy, tailings disposal, mineralogical analysis and the partnership with Minenco.