9^th January 2017 Kalgoorlie

Our main reason to come all the way up from Esperance to Kalgoorlie was to see the Super-Pit, a massive open surface gold mine and one of the biggest in the world covering 35,000 hectares. The Kalgoorlie Goldfield is one of the richest gold deposits in the world.

Super Pit

The first gold was mined in 1893 and eventually resulted in over 200 leases. Alan Bond played a significant part in consolidating and establishing a single large scale operation, which eventually became the Super-Pit operation under the management of KCMG on behalf of the two owners

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The Kalgoorlie Goldfield is part of the Norseman-Wiluna Belt, a greenstone belt consisting of volcanic and sedimentary rocks and surrounded by extensive granite. Tremors are frequently felt in the area.

Currently the pit is 500m deep and the plan is to dig down to 750m, although the water table is around 650m. Operations are planned to continue until 2035.

Each of the larger haul trucks bringing the rocks out of the mine carries 250 tonnes and will typically provide a golf ball size of gold per truck load. Their round time up and down is just over an hour and there are 40 on site. This is a 24/7 operation, although blasting only takes place in the day time. While there we saw a couple of areas blasted. The blast areas had been drilled in a matrix of approx. 10 holes along each side and two metres apart and 16m deep.

What is hard to judge is the size of the vehicles but when they are next to small pick-up trucks or small lorries; the scale is more obvious.

Face Shove (4020 bhp) plus service vehicle on pit flour dwarfing pick-up and lorry

Sheila shows size of Face Shovel's bucket (holds 68.5 tonnes)

Haul truck carrying 250 tonnes of rocks (2300 bhp)

The plant includes a significant level of post processing to extract the gold, which is transported to the Perth Mint on commercial passenger planes.

Haul trucks ascend and descend the pit 

Overall I estimated that the turnover is around $1.2 billion (AUS$) with a profit margin of approximately 38%.

Sheila & Mike kitted up to see the operations

Mike demonstrates size of truck tyres

After the trip we visited the Museum of Goldfields, which is well worth a visit,