The Hides gas-fired power station in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea has a total output of 64 megawatts and supplies electricity to Barrick's Porgera Gold Mine and various community and support industries into the Porgera Valley. At times generating capacity is impacted by unscheduled downtime events and lower than expected periods of generating efficiency, increasing the reliance on diesel power generation at the mine site to maintain mining and processing operations.
In 2007-08 GRS was engaged to work with a multi-disciplinary site team to review Operating pratices. The team subsequently developed and installed a revised management operating system to provide 24 hour performance monitoring of turbines so as to maximize the performance from the power station. Updating the data capture, reporting and analysis practices through simple design changes to existing management systems combined with and a facilitative approach to gain the workforce's buy-in in identifying and resolving issues provided a sound platform for sustainable improvement.
GRS's consulting experience in management systems implementation and supervisory coaching and mentoring has been valuable in assisting the operations team to more effectively deal with performance issues and develop sustained improvement in performance.
Savings to date are averaging a sustained 15,000/litres diesel/day and the project is on track to deliver an annual saving of US$5 million. Improved plant reliability has also led to reduced frequency and duration of downtime events in the processing plant related to switch-over to diesel power generation, resulting in additional ounces produced.
