Buner, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Diamond Blue Granite, Buner
A quarry blasting away its own margin. We stopped the blasting and took block recovery from under 20 percent to above 65.
- Location
- Buner, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- Material
- Diamond Blue graniteDimension stone grade
- Scope
- Deposit assessmentQuarry planningEquipment supplyExtractionBlock export
The situation
What we walked into
The lease held a strong blue granite deposit with real export value. The site was being worked with drilling and blasting, which is fast and cheap and destroys the product.
Blast fracturing was running through the blocks, so material that should have sold as premium dimension stone was going out as aggregate at a fraction of the price. Recovery of saleable block was under 20 percent of extracted volume.
Diamond wire saw machine cutting a vertical face on a granite bench
Squared granite blocks stacked in the block yard before loading
What we did
End to end
Consultation
We ran a full deposit assessment with core drilling to map the jointing pattern and the sound rock.
We laid out a bench plan that followed the natural joint structure instead of fighting it, and we costed the switch from blasting to wire sawing against the block price the stone could reach in export markets.
Equipment
We supplied two quarry diamond wire saw machines, a horizontal core boring machine for wire threading, rubber moulded granite diamond wire matched to the hardness of the Buner stone, and a portable trimming wire saw for squaring blocks on site before transport.
Operations
We commissioned every machine on the face and trained the crew over six weeks, running the first benches alongside them.
We set up a block yard with trimming and grading so that only saleable, squared stone left the site.
The result
What changed
Recovery of saleable block moved from under 20 percent to above 65 percent within the first year. The same deposit, the same crew, the same tonnes moved, and more than three times the value coming off it.
On site trimming cut freight cost per saleable cubic metre by roughly a quarter, because trucks stopped carrying waste stone down the mountain. First export containers of Diamond Blue block shipped within eight months of the first assessment visit.
- 20% to 65%
- Saleable block recovery, first year
- 3x
- Value off the same tonnes moved
- 25%
- Cut in freight cost per saleable cubic metre
- 8 months
- Assessment visit to first export container
Granite blocks loaded onto a truck on a mountain haul road
Feedback
We had been working this quarry for years and taking the low price for it. Halberg told us the stone was worth four times what we were getting, then showed us on the face exactly why. They stayed until our own people could run the machine.
Similar problem
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