Kwale Operations is located 50 kilometres south of Mombasa, the principal port facility for East Africa. Base Resources employs a hydraulic mining method.
Kwale incorporates the Kwale South Dune, Kwale North Dune and Bumamani deposits.
As part of implementation of the Bumamani Project to extend Kwale Operations mine life to late 2024, mining operations commenced on the North Dune in the 2023 reporting period. Mining now operates concurrently on the South and North Dunes, split equally between the two deposits.
Mining at Kwale North Dune and Bumamani is proposed to be undertaken solely by the HMU method. The HMU mining method has achieved all design throughput rates since commencement of operations at Kwale South. Mining will occur concurrently with mining of remaining Kwale South Ore Reserves to provide a blended feed and ensure that slime tails production does not exceed the process throughput limits.
The mining method is hydraulic mining, which Base Titanium has used successfully since 2017. It is non-selective, with hydraulic mining units (HMU) using high pressure water jets to sluice the entire ore face, which flows as a slurry to a sump and is then pumped, ultimately, to the wet concentrator plant (WCP).
Kwale South Dune
The pit slopes are currently about 50 degrees in Ore 1 and Ore 4 at the South Dune. The ore is scheduled to be mined in a radial extraction centred on proposed HMU sump locations. Sump location ........