KUJ 1365—A New Main Haulage Level in the

LKAB Kiruna Mine

Hans Engberg
LKAB, Kiruna, Sweden

ABSTRACT
The Swedish mining company LKAB operates two of the largest underground iron ore mines
in the world today that together produce around 45 Mton of iron ore per year. The mining in
Kiruna started around 1900 with open-pit mining until 1960 when the mining operation went
underground. The dominating mining method since has been SLC (Sub Level Caving) but
attempts with using SLS (Sub Level Stoping) has been made. The ore logistics includes a system
of ramps for accessing the mining areas, ore passes from each mining area to a main haulage
level, crushing and skip hoisting to the sorting-, processing- and pelletizing plants on surface.
The new Main Haulage Level is situated at 1365 meters depth below the top of Kiirunavaara
and is the seventh Main Haulage Level in the LKAB Kiruna mine. The first part of the new level
was taken into production in 2013 and will be completed in the beginning of 2017. The old
level, 1045, now decreasing in production, will be finally shut down in the beginning of 2016.
KUJ 1365 will have a production capacity of 35 Mton crude ore per year and a lifetime
of about 20 years. The total investment in this new production level will be 12.4 Billion SEK.

INTRODUCTION
The LKAB operation in Kiruna has been using Sub Level Caving (SLC) as the main mining
method since the mining went underground in the beginning of 1960. The method is very
suitable for mining large homogenous ore bodies with relatively low ore value, such as iron
ore. LKAB has refined and developed the SLC during the past 50 years and the method today
is considered reasonably efficient and productive. The LKAB R&D is continuously improving
the parameters of the caving operation.
The ore body today is divided into ten separate production areas. Each with its own venti-
lation system and its own group of ore passes. Normally a group of ore passes contains four ore
passes but some areas have a lesser amount depending on the size of the ore body in each area.
The ore passes goes down to the Main Haulage Level where driverless trains collects the ore and
transports it to dumping stations above the crusher level. After crushing the ore is hoisted in two
stages to surface for further refinement through sorting, processing, and pelletizing plants.
The Kiruna Under Ground Main Haulage Level at 1365 meters depth (KUJ 1365) is the
seventh Main Level in LKAB Kiruna’s history. The production on this level started in 2013 and
it will be in production until 2033. The total amount of in-situ ore to be mined exceeds 600
Mt at an average iron content of 65% Fe. KUJ 1365 is designed to produce 100 kton per day in
average during its lifetime.

313
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Figure 1.  LKAB Kiruna mining history

LKAB OVERVIEW
Luossavaara Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) is a Swedish mining company that runs two large
underground iron ore mines and one open pit mine, located above the Arctic Circle in the
north of Sweden at the towns of Kiruna and Malmberget.
The company produces about 45 Mton of crude ore per year, which after processing yields
about 27 Mton of products, mainly pellets and fines. LKAB has the ambition of opening up
two new open pit mines in the vicinity of Svappavaara and increase the crude ore production
up to about 60 Mton per year.
The Kiruna reserves mainly consist of high-grade magnetite ore with an average phos-
phorus content of about 0.35%. The Malmberget reserves are 80–85% high-grade magnetite
ore and about 15–20% hematite ore. In addition to the two operating underground mines,
the company has processing plants at Kiruna, Svappavaara and Malmberget. Processed ore is
transported by rail to harbors located in Narvik Norway and Luleå Sweden.
LKAB currently employs 4200 people with 1800 located in Kiruna of which 740 works
underground.
LKAB is a high technology company at the leading edge of mining automation. The new
1365-m haulage level is the fourth level with automatic driverless trains and remote filling of
the trains from the ore passes performed from a central control room. The control system also
optimizes the loading and unloading sequences by choosing to collect the ore from those ore
passes with the highest level and to deliver it to the dumping stations with the lowest level in
order to keep production running continuously in the loading operation as well as in the skip
hoisting. Production drilling is done using Atlas Copco Simba WL6 and Sandvik DL 520-W
rigs which are remote controlled from a central control room and capable of drilling a full ring
of 8–10 holes in automatic mode. At the Kiruna mine, loading is done with 15 electrically pow-
ered 25-ton Sandvik 625E load-haul-dump (LHD) units, of which four are fully automated and
also operated from a central control room. After filling the bucket using the remote control
 KUJ 1365—A NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL IN THE LKAB KIRUNA MINE 315

Figure 2.  LKAB Iron Ore Operations overview

Figure 3.  LKAB Production Structure overview

features, the unit will automatically drive to the assigned orepass, empty the bucket, and return
to the assigned draw point. There are also other types of machinery, such as rock breakers
above the ore passes that are remote controlled from a central control room.
Such a high degree of automation puts great demands on the computerized mine planning
system. Much effort has been taken to seamlessly integrate the mine planning system with
these and other control and process systems. The underground WLAN system has more than
800 access points and is currently used for communication between operators as well as trans-
ferring images from CCTV cameras, data transfer from scoop scales, communicating ring data
to/from drill rigs and many other things. LKAB is at the moment introducing both a personal
positioning system to increase safety underground as well as developing a vehicle bound com-
puter system for all mining machinery in order to increase productivity.
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Figure 4.  LKAB sub level caving

DESIGNING THE NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL

Since LKAB has chosen to use the SLC mining method in combination with groups of ore
passes and main haulage levels the decision to continue mining beyond each main haulage
level is taken as a “package” which contains all ingredients of building a totally new mining
infrastructure with a new main level at the bottom of the known ore body. For each new main
level decision the geology for the next stage of mining has to be examined and evaluated. This
is done by continuously, during mining the present stage, diamond drilling the next in such
an order that about ten years ahead of starting up a new main level the coming reserves are
determined.
At that time a certain amount of engineering (construction, time scheduling, simulation,
calculating and testing etc.) has to be carried out in order to have enough data to put a feasibil-
ity study together for making the decision whether to continue mining or not.
The feasibility study for KUJ 1365 was formally started in august 2005 after the presen-
tation of a pre-feasibility study performed the year before. The organization was settled in
January 2006 and the completion was made about two years later when the board of LKAB
decided in October 2008 to continue with the project and build a new main level at 1365
meters depth. The total investment cost was calculated to 12.4 Billion SEK.
The feasibility study contained four alternatives for mining to 1365 meters depth. The
different alternatives were:

1. A conventional train level with skip hoisting to surface

2. A conventional truck level with skip hoisting to surface
3. A combination of train level and inclined conveyor transport of the ore to 1045
main level
4. A combination of truck level and inclined conveyor transport of the ore to 1045
main level
 KUJ 1365—A NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL IN THE LKAB KIRUNA MINE 317

In order to separate the four alternatives a series of investigations were made. These were:

1. Rock Mechanical analyzes

2. Simulations of the production capacities
3. Life Cycle Cost analyzes
4. Time scheduling

Since the alternatives 3 and 4 included a certain amount of defensiveness which would
make it difficult to continue mining beyond 1365, major Rock Mechanical disadvantages and
also the lack of time available for building the new level, they were excluded from the study in
an early stage. Hence the main engineering work was made on alternative 1 and 2.
Finally it was the LCC- analyzes that showed that the best feasibility would be achieved by
building a conventional main level where driverless trains made the horizontal transportation
of the ore from groups of ore passes to dumping stations and with a conventional skip hoisting
system to the surface.

BUILDING THE NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL

Organization was chosen to include different blocks of competence. Therefore six sub organi-
zations were created:

77 Rock Development
77 Civil Engineering
77 Rolling Stock
77 Mine Services
77 Electricity/Automation
77 Health, Safety and Environment + CE-approval

Where the organization for Health, Safety and Environment + CE approval was working as a
matrix over all other blocks to ensure conformity and support.
While building a new level takes a long time and people involved are presumed to change
occupations, get sick, retire and so on it was early decided to “double” the leading persons.
Therefore a deputy project manager as well as deputy part project managers were recruited in
order to create a redundant project organization which would guarantee the continuity of the
project and reassure the time schedules fulfillment.
To support the project management a staff containing of economic controller, procure-
ment officer, documentation specialists and two time schedulers were recruited.
The five main blocks had their own budget, time schedule, specification and organiza-
tional responsibility and authority to deliver their respective results according to plan.
Overall decisions such as changes of the projects goals, economical issues etc. was made
by the steering committee consisting of a combination of project-department and production-
department managers.
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Figure 5.  LKAB Kiruna ore body and process flow

(PRESENTATION OF THE) MINING SYSTEM

Ore Passes and Production Areas
The 4000 meter long Kiruna ore body is divided into ten approximately standard sized 400
meters production areas which all have their own access from ramps, their own ventilation
system and resources from mine services. 37 ore passes and 24 ventilation shafts has been raise
drilled. From each production area a group of 2–5 ore passes (depending of the thickness of
the ore body in the actual area) goes along the 60 degree dip of the ore body down to the main
level at 1365 meters depth. They are each separated by 30–50 meters along the ore body. These
ore passes and ventilation shafts has a diameter of 3.05 meters and are drilled in three stages
(1020–1165 m, 1165–1252 m, 1252–1338 m) in order to be aligned in a straight way for avoid-
ing hang ups. The total amount of raise drilled shafts in the project is about 40 000 meters and
the amount of development drifts is 87 000 meters resulting in 11.5 Mton of waste rock from
creating the infrastructure for mine production during the coming 20 years.

Chutes and Filling Stations

Between 1338 and 1365 a vertical bin with 7 m diameter is built in order to avoid the ore pass
to go empty during production. In the bottom of each bin a NMT (Nordic Mine Technology)
hydraulic chute is installed for filling the trains. The operator controls the speed and direction
of the trains and uses both the moveable curtain boom and the chute lip movement to get the
right flow of ore into the cars.

Haulage Level
The Main Level is trafficked by 7 train sets with one Schalke locomotive and 21 NMT cars, each
with a standard payload of 650 tons. Apart from that 2 complete train sets are in a constant
maintenance loop. Once a week the Main Level has a 4 hours maintenance stop and twice a
year an 18 hour stop.
 KUJ 1365—A NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL IN THE LKAB KIRUNA MINE 319

Figure 6.  NMT Chute

Figure 7.  Schalke locomotive

A number of service vehicles (rail maintenance, vacuum cleaning, electrical maintenance

etc.) are available at all times.

Dumping Stations
Four separate NMT Dumping Stations has been built to handle the approximate 140 train
loops every day. LKAB uses a system with bottom dumping ore cars which makes it possible to
unload a train set of 650 tons in about 2½ minutes. Each dumping station has a dumping bin
the size of 2 train loads.

Crushers
Below each of the 4 dumping bins a Metso gyratory crusher, with a capacity of 3000 t/h,
crushes the ore in one step down to <100 mm particles—suitable for skip hoisting. Beneath
each crusher a 4000 ton crusher bin works as a buffer before the skips.
The hoisting of ore to the surface is done in two steps where the first is done by five ABB
5.6 MW AC koepe hoists 2 × 33.4 tons, of Jeto type, running at 17 m/s and having a capacity
320 UNDERGROUND HORIZONTAL TRANSPORT

 
Figure 8.  NMT ore car

Figure 9.  NMT dumping station (direction of movement from left to right)

each of 1500 tons/h. The second step is done by seven ABB 4.2 MW DC koepe hoists (both
single 40 tons and double 22 tons) with the same speed but slightly less hourly capacity.

Control System
The Midroc overall control system controls about 12 500 I/O and includes a Bombardier off-
the-shelf train control system. It is designed to allow the trains on the main level to run in an
automatic mode after being filled, through dumping and back to an assigned filling station—
again waiting for an operator to remotely take over and fill the train. The system collects the
ore from the ore pass which has the biggest amount of ore, in order to avoid the ore pass to
go full and hence stop the loading operation, and dumps it in the dumping station that has
the smallest amount of material in order to avoid the skips to stop. The Midroc system uses
Siemens hardware. The control system for hoisting is of ABB 800 xA type and is integrated
with the Midroc overall system.

Control Center
On surface a new state-of-the-art control center has been built to control the mining produc-
tion. It contains the operator environment as well as offices, rest rooms, lunch rooms, server
halls etc. From there the mining operations are controlled around the clock, all days a week.
 KUJ 1365—A NEW MAIN HAULAGE LEVEL IN THE LKAB KIRUNA MINE 321

Figure 10.  Dumping station, crusher and crusher bin

Figure 11.  Stage hoisting

Figure 12. 
322 UNDERGROUND HORIZONTAL TRANSPORT

CONCLUSIONS
The Main Haulage Level project has during its lifetime and afterwards been measured by its
delivery in terms of achieved conformity to time schedule, functionality according to stipu-
lated specification and economic outcome compared to budget. By all three measurements
the project has succeeded to fulfill the requirements and LKAB has with the new Main Level,
KUJ 1365, a rational production facility with excellent conditions to continue the mining of
Kiirunavaara for the next 20 years.