Page 11: of Marine Technology Magazine (September 2022)

Tech Talk: Crawlers for Mining

Marc/Adobestock

Arctic Canadian Diamond Company and IHC Mining reached the next important milestone in the development of the underwater remote min- ing (URM) system for the extraction of diamond-bearing kimberlite ore from deep open pits at the Ekati Diamond Mine in the Northwest Ter- ritories of Canada. Arctic Canadian and IHC Mining started their coop- eration in 2018, to jointly develop a mining solution. From the start, an important focus is to develop a mining solution that would have a much lower environmental impact than conventional mining methods. As the

URM crawler is only mining the kimberlite ore and minimal waste, it signi? cantly reduces the mine’s footprint. The URM solution could al- low the Ekati Diamond Mine to extend its lifetime by at least 10 years.

The underwater mining crawler is a remote operated continuous min- ing machine. The ore is excavated with a drum cutter in small layers and eliminates the need for blasting. From the crawler the ore is pumped to the surface of the ? ooded pit via a vertical pipeline system to the Launch and Recovery Platform. The crawler system is capable of operating at a water depth of up to 400m.

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