People are fascinated by mines and mining landscapes, whether the operations are on the surface as open cast mines, or the operations take place underground. I have been underground in various mines six times, but as a permanently curious person, I am still waiting for my seventh chance to have another go.
The fascination of going underground seems to arise not from the chance of meeting mine workers six or ten kilometers into the bowels of the earth, but rather arises from the “I survived it factor”. It is indeed a matter of pride and a life achievement factor to be able to tell others, 'I have been underground six times!” The usual reaction of your listeners would be questions and exclamations:”Hey! How's it like down there?”, or “Did you see gold/ what did you see there?” etc.
With surface or open cast mines, the experience is an entirely different proposition. Here, it seems that the fascination is generated by the huge open cast landscapes, the tall tailings ridges and mountains, and even more importantly, the monstrously huge machinery, both mobile and stationary. Mines are so fascinating that several years ago some of us decided that it was high time to open up the mines in Ghana to enable Ghanaians to visit to have their curiosity satisfied.
visiting mines
We began with a survey to determine whether Ghanaians and tourists would actually buy the idea of visiting mines. The initial research and subsequent ones into possibilities of introducing mines tourism remarkably revealed very interesting results. The fact was that about 80% of people in Ghana would be delighted to tour or visit a mine operation.
Of this high percentage, we also found out that 75% of that number would be willing to make a modest payment for the chance to tour a mine and to see how gold or some other precious metal is produced, manufactured or its ore extracted. Ghanaians are a curious, enquiring lot.
A visit to a mine also, in my personal estimation, enables us to come to terms with our basic humanity, to know how tiny and insignificant we are as human beings in the vast openness of the surface mine against the backdrop of huge and heavy machinery.
One fact, however, that may be easily lost on a visitor in the excitement of the tour of a mine, is the monstrously large investment that a mine represents.
To satisfy my curiosity in this regard, and wanting to know how much a mining operation costs, I made arrangements and managed to tour the Gold Fields operations in Tarkwa and Darmang. I was not disappointed with my layman tour of a huge mining operation. I had for example seen tipping trucks before, but I was quite unprepared for the spectacle of machinery that confronted my eyes.
For the first time in my varied life, I was seeing 25-foot tall dumpsters of tipping trucks whose tyres have a diameter of over six feet. Wanting to know how it might feel to sit twenty feet above the ground behind the wheel and drive such a brute, my guide and protector laughed and explained that the operators of those machines are specially trained in South Africa in simulators to begin with, the same way that people are trained to pilot commercial airplanes.
In spite of the size of these trucks which would not fit on our normal roads [30 in all], I was still astonished to be told that the trucks, technically called Caterpillar785 Dump Trucks weigh 150 tonnes each, the weight of a moon-bound spacecraft! The trucks gave me my first indication of how much the Gold Fields Company has invested by way of heavy machinery at its operations.
In fact, Gold Fields belongs to the global Gold Fields family, a multi-national precious metal producer with its headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Gold Fields family has four operating mines in South Africa, with two in Australia and two in Ghana. I was also informed that the company has projects at various stages of development in neighbouring Burkina Faso, and far away Peru in South America. Gold Fields is not a new name in global mining circles.
Far from that, the company is considered to be one of the first global mining conglomerates in the world, and its contact with Ghana had its genesis in 1990 when it acquired the right to operate the then existing underground mine in Tarkwa. Since then, Gold Fields has never looked back. In 1996, after reviewing the large surface deposits of ore near the existing underground operation, Gold Fields developed a heap leach surface mining operation which increased the mine life by more than two decades.
expansion programme
This began the expansion programme of Gold Fields in the Western Region. In 2000, the Company purchased a portion of the Teberebie mine south of the existing open cast mining operation.
Two years later, Gold Fields acquired the Aboso Goldfields Darmang mine, an action which the same year led to the declaration of Gold Fields as the second largest gold producer in Ghana. Presently, however, the company is the largest gold producer in Ghana with an annual production in excess of 900,000 ounces from its operating mines at Tarkwa and Darmang, engaging over 4,000 Ghanaians in direct employment.
My visit to the Tarkwa mine also brought me into contact with another record-holding piece of machinery. After 2004, Gold Fields successfully commissioned the largest single stage SAG mill in the world! From a distance, these two rotating mills looked large enough to confound your mind on how they were transported from China to Tarkwa.
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