Ben Writes

Since moving to UB I have been writing this blog so I asked Ben to write a few words about where he works. For those people that don't know Ben works away on site, he catches the company bus on Monday mornings and comes home Friday nights to be home for the weekends.


Ben writes;
My role is called “Principal Geologist”, which in terms of site means that I’m a geologist in a consulting and advising role, especially in the area of Mining and the responsibilities of the Mine Geology Team.
The total workforce is about 500 people, 50 of whom are expats, mainly Australians, then Canadians, Kiwis, Philippinos, Americans and Indians. On site there are about 25 expats, the others are in the UB office.
The mine is an open cut which produces about 250,000oz per year. It’s not really too different from mines in Australia . As they say “If you’ve seen one open cut mine, you’ve seen them all”. The orebody and overall geology make the difference between mines. This mine has about 24 million tonnes at 1.6g/t so it’s a large, low grade deposit processed currently with a CIL plant and hopefully to soon commence a Heap-Leach. I won’t go into detail explaining these, but suffice it to say that the CIL is a big process plant with tanks, crushing circuits and mills, the heap leach is a big crushed stockpile that has chemicals pumped over it.
The mine life is until 2010 unless the company get approvals to start the Gatsuurt project which will add a few more years. I have a two year contract with the company.

Picture: Site Camp






Picture: Mill and office area