C MCCAMLEY, P PETRUCCI AND K BLAY
14thAusIMM Mill Operators’ Conference, 29-31 August 2018, Brisbane, Australia
Australia
ABSTRACT
The Newmont Boddington Gold (NBG) processing plant was designed for 35Mt/y with ball mills expected to
deliver a combined new mill feed rate of 4837 tonnes/hr. Since beginning commercial production in late
2009, the plant has steadily increased throughput to meet design capacity in 2014 and reached 37 Mt/y in
- Through improved efficiencies, changes to the milling circuit have taken place since commissioning to
take the plant beyond its design to an actual throughput of 39.0 Mt in 2017 and a budgeted throughput of
39.4 Mt/y this year.
The NBG milling circuit has four parallel ball mills, each consisting of a 7.9 x 13.4 m ball mill with twin
7.5 MW fixed speed motors in closed circuit with twelve 650 mm cyclones. Each mill is fed by two wet
screens with the undersize gravitating to a mill discharge hopper where it is combined with the ball mill
discharge and pumped to hydrocyclones for classification. The cyclone underflow is re-ground to a target P80
of 150 μm.
This paper will focus on process improvements made to the NBG milling circuit which include cyclone
reconfiguration, fine screen panel redesign, implementation of an expert control system, mill power draw
increase and grinding media changes to take NBG beyond its design throughput.
AUTHOR DETAILS
C MCCAMLEY (1), P PETRUCCI (2) AND K BLAY (3)
(1) MAusIMM, Production Metallurgist, Newmont Mining Corp, Boddington WA 6390.
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(2) MAusIMM, Senior Metallurgist, Newmont Mining Corp, Boddington WA 6390. Email:
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(3) Manager - Process Control Pilot, Newmont Mining Corp, Subiaco WA 6008. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CEEC acknowledges and thanks The Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy for organising the 14thAusIMM Mill Operators’ Conference (MillOps 2018).
Abstracts can be found at the MillOps 2018 website.