Technician inspects a bucket wheel used to scoop bauxite from stockpiles.
Assets
CBG has extensive facilities for mining, transporting, processing and loading bauxite for world shipment. This includes a complete rail transport system, ore crushing, calcining ovens, stacking/conveying equipment and a shipping terminal at Kamsar.
Every few hours an ore train loaded with thousands of tonnes of bauxite comes rolling out of the hills from Sangaredi. Swinging past the city of Boke, the region’s capital, it crosses the flat coastal plains to Kamsar, by the sea.
The processing plant is at Kamsar. Here the ore cars are swiftly unloaded, feeding bauxite through the plant in an ever-flowing stream. Huge boulders of ore are crushed in a hammermill and dried in large, rotating kilns. A belt conveyor almost a mile long then carries the bauxite over a long, narrow jetty out into the harbor, where it pours into the hold of a waiting cargo ship from overseas.
It takes at least 14 hours of uninterrupted feeding to fill one of these ocean-going vessels with bauxite. In a typical year about 250 of them sail from Kamsar, carrying the ore to destinations across the world. The flow of bauxite then branches out and continues through alumina refineries, aluminum smelters and fabricating plants, emerging finally as the thousands of different varieties of aluminum products used worldwide.
Most of the bauxite is purchased directly by the aluminum companies from North America and Europe which are Guinea’s partners in CBG. For them, this stream is
a valuable source of supply in a strategically important and highly competitive industry.
|
|
|
|
