Customer requirements:

On Jamaica, the world's leading aluminium producer Alcoa was looking into several ways to transport their raw material, bauxite. A distance of 3.4 km and a vertical descent of 470 m had to be covered from the mine at Mt. Olyphant to the railhead at St. Jago. Existing roads for transport by truck lead through inhabited areas, and a by-pass road would have been too costly both in terms of construction and maintenance.
 

Our solution:

The Mt. Olyphant RopeCon^® transports 1,200 tons of sticky bauxite per hour and needs just one section to cover the entire distance. The material is discharged onto a debris cone, and no line structures obstruct the wheeled loaders which take up the material from there. With RopeCon^®, our customer got a truly sustainable solution: space requirements were minimised, 1,200 truck journeys a day along with the associated emissions of CO₂ and fine dust were saved, and the system generates approximately 1,300 kW of braking energy per hour which is fed back into the power grid.

Not even hurricane Dean, a category 4 storm which ravaged the island with winds of up to 249 km/h, caused any harm to the installation: the system was back in operation as soon as the necessary safety checks had been carried out.

 
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