28
CONSTRUCTION WORLD
MARCH
2014
The overall project
consists
of
the
establishment of a
sequence of large
open cut pits, the
construction of a
new Coal Handling
and Preparation Plant (CHPP), a new rapid
rail load out terminal and all associated
infrastructure. Costing ZAR8,2-billion, the
project is intended to process 7,9 million
tonnes of saleable thermal coal per annum
– for both the local and export market –
over a lifespan of approximately 24 years”.
WBHO, the main contractor, entered the
civils package of this project for 2013’s Best
Projects. The project was recognised with a
Best Projects award in the ‘Civil Engineering
contractors’ category. The civil package
includes the following major elements:
rom bin and primary sizing station; transfer
stations; secondary sizing station; dragline
crossing; raw coal stockpile tunnel; tertiary
sizing station; discard bin; magnetite
handling; cpp building; tailings thickener
and process water handling; product stock-
pile tunnel and overland conveyors.
Construction innovation
The timeous completion of the project is
of utmost importance to the client and
in an effort to ensure that the project is
completed on time all major activities was
planned with this in mind. To this affect
construction joints was optimised in an
effort to reduce time lost as a normal result
of successive pours. Most notably was the
construction of the coal valves at the raw
coal tunnel. Here seven metre high by one
metre thick chamber walls were cast mono-
lithically, drastically reducing the overall
construction duration on the tunnel.
Corporate social
investment
Although there were no project specific
requirements for corporate social invest-
ment
for
Tweefontein,
WBHO
has
supported many projects in the area
like the Middelburg Care Village, the
Bambabani Soup Kitchen, the Ogies
and Phola combined schools, and both
the Thuthukani and Etokozweni Primary
schools. In addition this project was imple-
mented with the overall group strategy for
all areas of empowerment such as pref-
erential procurement from black-owned
and black women-owned suppliers, and
enterprise development. WBHO achieved
a BBBEE spend of approximately 70% of
the contract value, of which 20% was with
companies with Black Female ownership of
30% or more.
Design innovation
With the commissioning of the plant being
such a priority an attempt was made to
modularise as much of the project as
possible. This has obvious time benefits as
many of the components could be manu-
factured concurrently. Another example
was constructing the Stockpile tunnels
with pre-cast concrete culvert sections.
This method reduced the overall
construction time of the tunnels by approx-
imately 30%.
Enviromental impact
As the first construction company to be ISO
14001 certified through all the different
divisions within South Africa, WBHO has
implemented their EMS (Environmental
Management System) on the Tweefontein
Optimisation Project (TOP) being driven
TWEEFONTEIN
Tweefontein Optimisation
Project (TOP) is located
25 kilometres south of
Witbank, Mpumalanga
and is an optimisation of
existing coal operations
and reserves within the
Tweefontein Complex,
which increases capacity
and extends the
life of the existing
mining operations.
