By Sabrina Cataldo
As fuel costs soar, bottom lines shrink. The time and effort required to move tracked equipment across mine sites is a major driver of unproductive machine hours and fuel use.
Transporting equipment is a challenge so baked into mining operations that many see the costs of time, money and machine life as inevitable. For a large operation, unnecessary machinery movement can easily represent millions of dollars annually in wasted fuel alone.
“When machines spend time relocating between work areas rather than performing productive tasks, you’re essentially burning fuel to generate zero revenue,” said Jim Thompson, Vice President of Sales for Mining at Brandt.
At the same time, commodity prices are at elevated levels.
“Getting materials out of the ground and into the market quickly and efficiently is a priority,” Thompson said.
Compounding costs
The financial impact extends beyond fuel. There’s increased maintenance from additional engine hours and component wear, plus track degradation from extra kilometres travelled. Then, there are the indirect costs, such as lost productive time, operator wages paid for non-value-adding activities and reduced fleet utilization rates affecting overall productivity metrics, not to mention lost revenue caused by delays in getting product to market.
“There are many issues with the typical way of moving equipment on a mine site that interfere with productivity and profitability,” Thompson said.
“There’s total cost of ownership, which is not only the cost of the machine, but also fuel, maintenance and repairs; mechanical availability — the downtime you experience during the time it takes to do that maintenance; and effective availability — using the machine in the most efficient and effective way. The ability to move equipment quickly and easily allows for more flexible and efficient mine planning that takes changes in production needs into account.”
Safety is also a concern.
The vibration caused when moving a machine not only wears out components, but it also causes operator fatigue and even long-term health effects.
“Reducing vibration improves work comfort and job satisfaction, leading to greater productivity and alertness, which reduces the chances of an incident,” Thompson said.
And then there is the byproduct of excessive fuel use: CO2 emissions. The hours spent moving machines and the huge amounts of fuel used can result in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emissions per mining operation each year.
“The mining industry is always looking for ways to eliminate waste and reduce its environmental footprint,” notes Thompson.
A transport alternative
The key to addressing the above challenges is treating equipment movement as a cost to be minimized through different modes of transportation. An alternative to crawling machines to get them from Point A to Point B is to employ a transportation system using lowboy trailers or dollies, such as those by Sleipner Finland.
“We had a customer who used the Sleipner system to relocate a 570-tonne capacity machine. That move would normally have taken 40 hours. They now do it in 45 minutes. With a 12-hour workday, that means you can move 140 trucks in a single shift,” Thompson said.
Using Sleipner’s E-Series dollies to move a single 570-tonne excavator delivers substantial savings across multiple metrics over the course of a year. The system can increase annual production by $2 million to $3 million while saving between $200,000 to $400,000 in undercarriage rebuild parts, reducing overall life cycle costs by 10 to 15 per cent.
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Time savings are equally impressive, with 396 hours of travelling time eliminated annually. Environmental benefits are also significant. If an operation saves about 100,000 litres of fuel per year, that translates to a reduction of more than 250 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Sleipner’s DB Series Trailers are another alternative to consider.
“Operators appreciate the way these trailers are set up. With competing systems, you have to disconnect the trailer and drive the equipment on the front, a process that takes 45 minutes and leads to safety concerns,” Thompson said.
“With the Sleipner system, trailers are permanently connected with a rear-loading system, and you can load or unload the same piece of equipment in two minutes. Our customers really value the time savings and increased safety.”
The path forward
In an industry where margins are increasingly tight and environmental scrutiny continues to intensify, the inefficiency of traditional equipment transportation can no longer be dismissed as simply “the way things have always been done.”
The data tells a compelling story: hundreds of thousands of litres of wasted fuel, lost productivity, shortened equipment life, compromised safety and unnecessary carbon emissions — all stemming from a single operational practice that has viable alternatives.
The mining industry has always excelled at optimizing the big-picture elements.
Yet the opportunity hiding in plain sight — the hours spent crawling heavy machinery across sites at walking pace — represents one of the last major frontiers for efficiency gains. When a 45-minute equipment move can replace what previously took 40 hours, the math says it all.
