ERAMET Ingénierie’s teams regularly demonstrate their ability to deliver high-quality projects in accordance with current standards and regulations, on time and on cost, in order to meet their customers’ requirements. They can take part in a wide range of large-scale projects for both the ERAMET Group and other customers, as these examples show.
Mining projects
ERAMET Ingénierie was involved in a project for the beneficiation of an Indonesian nickel deposit, Weda Bay Nickel. The company contributed 76,000 hours as project manager in the pre-feasibility and feasibility stages. Its work focused on:
- Ore preparation, transport, storage and recovery;
- Waste transport and storage;
- Conversion of nickel concentrates into nickel metal.
ERAMET Ingénierie was also involved in the Maboumine rare earth project in Gabon. In its assistance to the project owner, the company supported the customer’s teams in the preparation and needs definition phase and supervised feasibility studies on the pilot plant. As project manager, it conducted several framework and pre-feasibility studies on all or part of the project, which represented 75,000 hours’ work in total.
Finally, ERAMET Ingénierie’s teams are working on pre-feasibility studies for the production of lithium carbonate from brine lakes in Argentina. The process under examination was developed in partnership with ERAMET Research and includes all the key stages from brine extraction to obtaining a commercial product. ERAMET Ingénierie has contributed 30,000 hours to the project so far.
New facility projects
In mineralurgy, ERAMET Ingénierie developed a project for the beneficiation of sand with COMILOG’s teams in Gabon. The idea is to recover the manganese ore contained in sediments in the Moulili River by magnetic separation. ERAMET Ingénierie totalled 36,000 hours’ work on the project.
In hydrometallurgy, ERAMET Ingénierie is the manager of the Estuaire project in Sandouville, France. The project involves adapting a high-purity nickel production plant to operate with a modified nickel source. The feasibility phase was completed in 2015 and implementation is now in progress. In total, ERAMET Ingénierie’s services on the project represent 57,000 hours’ work as of the end of 2016.
In pyrometallurgy, ERAMET Ingénierie developed the preliminary design of a facility for recovering metals from raw materials, by-products or complex residue from recycling channels, for an industrial site in Belgium.
In addition to these fundamental ore processing technologies, ERAMET Ingénierie carried out projects in the energy sector for SLN in New Caledonia:
- Contributing to a preliminary study on a 180 MW electricity plant to replace the current unit powering the nickel processing plant (40,000 hours);
- Building a new pulverised coal workshop replacing four horizontal hot gas generators for nickel ore drying with two vertical generators (28,000 hours).
Finally, ERAMET Ingénierie managed projects for the creation of UKAD’s titanium ingot processing plant (32,000 hours) in Auvergne, France, leading to the opening of Europe’s first production channel for aviation-grade titanium alloys, and, in 2016, EcoTitanium, a titanium scrap recycling project on the same site (26,000 hours).
Modernisation projects on existing facilities
In 2010 and 2011, ERAMET Ingénierie took part in the replacement of nickel ore pre-dryers in SLN’s plant in Doniambo, New Caledonia. The project required 6,000 hours of work and made a 25% capacity increase possible before the hot gas generators were modified.
In June 2013, SLN upgraded one of its rotary furnaces to reach a new milestone on productivity and improve operators’ working conditions. ERAMET Ingénierie contributed 6,000 hours to the project from 2011 to 2013.
In Gabon, over the past 15 years ERAMET Ingénierie has taken on the electrical upgrading and control & command of the beneficiation plant and storage park at Moanda station (manganese mine), Owendo storage port (shipment port), and the primary and secondary pre-homogenising workshops upstream of COMILOG’s Moanda beneficiation plant.
Audits, modelling, on-site acceptance
As well as project management and project owner assistance services, ERAMET Ingénierie offers additional services including:
- technical audits,
- acceptance in plants or on sites,
- modelling.
For example, ERAMET Ingénierie assisted AREVA in optimising engineering studies for the Imouraren project by sharing feedback on the following points: CAPEX/OPEX analysis, project standards, mine/plant interface, mechanical ore preparation, infrastructures, instrumentation and control-command, maintenance.
ERAMET Ingénierie developed software to simulate the process at CMM, Comilog’s metallurgical complex in Moanda, Gabon. It is used to test automations and to train the site’s future operators.
