MechChem Africa talks to Richard Gundersen of BBE Group, a world leading and independent engineering consultancy for mine ventilation and cooling solutions. With over 30 years of design and development experience, BBE Group has been involved in many of the deepest and most challenging mine ventilation, cooling and heating projects in the world.
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The two men who started BBE in 1989, Stephen Bluhm and Rod Burton, came from the Chamber of Mines Research Organisation (COMRO). They were key researchers on the ventilation and cooling aspects of hot mines. But towards the end of the 1980s, “They detected the need for a client consultancy to help mining companies resolve the challenging issues of deep mine ventilation, which they were unable to offer from within COMRO. So in 1989, they formed Bluhm Burton Engineering (BBE) as an independent engineering consultancy specifically for mine ventilation and cooling,” BBE Group director, Richard Gundersen, tells MechChem Africa.
“Then, in the late 1990s, the mining industry embarked on a genuinely industry-wide research project called DeepMine, which was set up to explore the feasibility of mining at depths of between 4 000 and 5 000 m,” says, Gundersen.
“This was a huge project, involving CSIR-MiningTech (previously COMRO), mining houses, universities and consultancies. Initially I was involved through Gold Fields, where I was a consulting engineer, and I joined BBE during the course of this investigation. Basically, DeepMine was about identifying the showstoppers for mining at these depths: the costs, the power involved, safety and, of course, in our case, the technologies for ventilation and cooling.
“Mining down to 5 000 metres was found to be viable, but nobody needed to go there yet. We ended up with tables of metal-price thresholds that would be needed for financial viability, along with a lot of insight into the technologies and solutions we would need to develop and apply,” he continues.
South Africa, through COMRO, the DeepMine Project and other initiatives, continued its dominance in mining research into ventilation and cooling in deep level, narrow-reef mining and deep block cave mining in the diamond and copper industries.
“South Africa has deep and hot mines with challenging ventilation and cooling issues. BBE has since kept developing this core expertise and is now over 30 years old. Our founding members have some 100 years of direct collective experience in cooling and ventilating mines – in South Africa, across Africa and in every continent of the world apart from Antarctica,” he adds.
Gundersen’s work in the ventilation and cooling field for Gold Fields put him in close contact with BBE and he joined them in 1999. “When the platinum and coal mines were unbundled from Gold Fields, my colleagues invited BBE to bring my project engineering and a colleague’s civil engineering experience to the company to help them build an extension to the refrigeration plant at Northam Platinum. So we put a project team together and established BBE Projects, with Northam Platinum’s cooling plant being our first success.
“We designed and built some early systems on an EPCM basis for Impala Platinum. Then Anglo American wanted two plants for Obuasi Mine in Ghana on a full turnkey basis. Incredibly, we established the first refrigeration plant in Ghana in just seven and a half months. This still blows my mind compared to how long it now takes to negotiate all the legal and bureaucratic permissions required to establish any new plant these days,” he says.
BBE Projects quickly developed a very good and lasting reputation across the African continent. “We obviously have a very strong consultancy operation, with 85% of our staff working as engineering consultants on the cooling and ventilation side. There are only a dozen of us doing project work, but design team consultants will often slide over to the project team when we start to implement a project. We now also have two Australian offices – in Perth and Brisbane – and a Canadian office, which brings our total staff complement to over 100 people.
“Because of Covid, we have learned to have conversations with people all over the world and, in many ways, we have become more productive. We can now attend meetings that we weren’t able to travel to, for example. Our default is to work from our offices, though, because we feel that engineers need to be able to walk into the drawing office, talk to the electrical or civil engineer, for example, and make ad-hoc decisions. Spontaneous conversations don't quite happen in Teams,” he suggests.
He relates that during Covid, Andrew Branch, the current MD for BBE Projects, completed a project in Canada at Vale’s Coleman mine in Canada. “The project started at the end of 2019, but Covid hit a few months later in March 2020, so he had to run the whole project – in a new country with a new client and a new construction team on the ground – remotely from South Africa.” This despite several commissioning challenges, including limited space availability for the 10.3 MW air cooling plant, a very short delivery time, and power availability shortages.
“The Coleman mine has one plant where gas burners must be used near the surface in winter to prevent water pipes from freezing. These are the types of projects we like to get involved with, because we understand how the climatic influences on the mine affect the cooling system design and demand.
“A mine in Ghana, for example, might to need a cooling system that runs for 12 months a year, at part load for a couple of months. In Canada, though, they run the heaters for three months, they may go through spring and autumn with nothing running, and then will need cooling for the three months of summer. So the design criteria change, because the low usage factor makes it unviable to use a sophisticated chilled-water system like the ones we use in the deep gold and platinum mines in South Africa,” he explains.
He cites another interesting Canadian project, not one of theirs, where mining takes place under permafrost. “The ground on the surface is a friable shale-type rock, bound together by ice. If the ice melts, there is a risk of shaft collapse, so to keep it frozen, a pipe network has been installed down to about 20 to 30 m, with a refrigerant at around
-10 °C continuously being pumped through it,” Gundersen informs MechChem Africa.
“We understand that every client system has different nuances: the cost of electricity, remoteness or it might be totally off-grid: the list is endless. We don’t do plugin solutions, and while we have a lot of experience to start from, we always need to include modifications to meet site or climate conditions,” Gundersen notes.
The key reason for BBE Group’s success? “We stick to our knitting,” Gundersen responds. “We have become specialists in every aspect of mine cooling and very few competitors have our breadth of knowledge. We see the bigger picture: a mine’s next extension plans, where the new shafts and declines might be and the mining fleets generating the heat loads.
Gundersen also lifts out the BBE-developed VUMA mine ventilation simulation software as a reason to be proud. “We see VUMA as a program with AI capabilities, which I prefer to call ‘applied intelligence’, because the intelligence is not artificial. VUMA was created using our experience of real ventilation systems.
The software incorporates our engineering intelligence with respect to heat flow for mine cooling requirements and how that can be best managed,” he explains.
“Over the top of that, we have created better and better user friendliness. So it becomes possible to build a mine model very quickly, which can then be developed into a cooling and ventilation model.
Our VUMA program guides users into the specifications for their mine cooling requirements so the simulation results are always within a realistic range. It really is a pleasure to use and a great tool for initiating sophisticated mine cooling systems,” he adds.
The future outlook? “We've never had to cut back and we continue to grow steadily,” says Gundersen. The mining industry will always need cooling and we will be on standby to deliver. The fact that we continue to get more work suggests that the mining industry is robust and expanding.
Surface mines are going underground, underground mines are going deeper and the world cannot get enough of the minerals it needs, such as copper and lithium.
“When it comes to pure ventilation, we encounter stiff competition, but if cooling is involved, few can deliver what BBE can,” he concludes.