Chichester Hub in the Chichester Ranges includes the Cloudbreak and Christmas Creek mines.
At Cloudbreak the Bigge development entered production in Q3 FY22. Bigge expands Cloudbreak further west and contributes low strip ratio material which supports the overall Fortescue product strategy.
Cloudbreak
The mining model is based on strip mining. Mining at Cloudbreak will continue to be carried out as open pit strip mining.
The pits are developed progressively, where a starter pit is opened (with overburden from the starter pit placed in a small overburden stockpile). As the mining face progresses, the open pit is progressively backfilled and rehabilitated.
The majority of the ore will be mined using surface miners. Surface miners can cutto an accuracy of 0.1 m and can extract ore without the need for drilling, blasting, or primary crushers to crush ore. Ore is loaded from the surface miner into trucks for transfer to the OPF.
Christmas Creek
Drill and blast
Drilling and blasting is used to allow areas of hard rock overburden to be removed. Drilling and blasting is undertaken in accordance with current operational procedures, which generally incorporate the following steps:
1. A series of holes are drilled into the rock.
2. The holes are filled with explosives and detonated.
3. The rock breaks up or collapses after detonation and the rock rubble is then removed.
4. The cleared rock face i ........
