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KCM makes progress: After almost two years in operation under very adverse conditions, KCM is making headway and significantly raising production, as John Chadwick saw on a recent visit.

Article Excerpt
Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) operates the Konkola mine (started producing in 1957) and concentrator, the Nchanga underground (in operation since 1937) and open pit (operating since 1955) mines, the Nchanga East and West mills, the Nchanga West cobalt mill, the Nchanga Tailings Leach Plant (TLP) and the Nampundwe pyrite mine and concentrator (MM, June 2001, ppl4-22). The Nchanga operations centre on Chingola, with Konkola lying some 20 km to the north-northwest. Nampundwe is not on the Copperbelt but lies 48 km west of Lusaka. However, it is essential to the Copperbelt, producing iron pyrite containing about 40% S that is used in the Nkana and Mufulira smelters and the roast leach electrowin plants (the Chambishi Metals and Mopani cobalt plants). It also supplies fertiliser manufacturer Nitrogen Chemicals of Zambia. KCM is named for its Konkola mine and the Konkola Mine Deep Project (KDMP) which is its long-term future. The latter project has been deferred for the time being in the light of weak copper and coba lt prices.

KCM is spending $270 million on refurbishment of all operations. Of this total, some $124 million is being spent at Nchanga Division, $77 million at Konkola and $8 million at Nampundwe. The remainder is for 'off-mine' projects and preliminary work on KDMP. This refurbishment is a huge task involving well over 1,000 separate contracts. By comparison, a new large mine might require about 100 contracts. Although extensive due diligence work was carried out by Anglo American prior to the purchase, such work cannot be expected to accurately reflect the refurbishment required. Once work started, some of the mines and plants turned out to worse than expected, while others posed pleasant surprises. Every facility was seriously under-capitalised. Both underground mines, for example, had hardly any developed reserves and waste stripping at Nchanga open pit (NOP) was well behind what was required. Much of the mining equipment (surface and underground) was in very poor condition.

Since then, Nchanga underground has exceeded expectations while NOP has been adversely affected by the accident (a major slope failure) that occurred in April 2001. Conditions were worse at Konkola mine than expected, but all concentrators have responded quicker than the mines. Their cost performance is going down with increased recoveries and better efficiencies and today they have spare capacity. KCM's concentrates are sent to both the Nkana (Smelterco) and Mufulira (Mopani) smelters, as well as cobalt concentrates to the Chambishi and Nkana cobalt plants. Smelterco was a huge bottleneck last year, but towards the end of 2001 the smelter was beginning to perform at expected capacity.

Because ZCCM had so little capital to spend in its final years, it took KCM six to seven months to re-establish its supply pipelines. That lack of capital also meant that certain aspects of what is today generally expected technology was not available to the mines. For instance, in mid-2001 KCM installed six CAD workstations at Nchanga and Konkola mines. Now the mines have an electronic information management system. Until then all engineering drawings were done manually. All existing manual and microfilmed drawings have now been converted into the electronic format

Because of all these problems, KCM has not achieved its targets for production in 2000 and 2001. The refurbishment has become a four-year, rather than three-year, programme. Annualised production in 2000 was 165,000 t of copper and the company...