South American copper mine downtime cuts: Lubrication Engineers case insights for reliability
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
A large South American copper mine has increased crusher availability to production by 2.2% after switching the bushing gear oil to a formulation supplied by Lubrication Engineers. The change also cut lubricant consumption by 83%, delivering direct cost savings alongside reduced handling and storage requirements. For reliability engineers, the case underlines the impact of lubricant selection on crusher uptime without major mechanical modifications.
Technical Brief
- Change focused on the bushing gear oil in large primary and/or secondary crushers.
- Repeated crusher failures were occurring before lubricant change, directly impacting mine production schedules.
- Root cause analysis by the mine’s maintenance reliability team linked downtime to inadequate gear oil performance.
- Reduced lubricant volume handled lowers operator exposure during oil changes and storage movements.
- Fewer interventions on crushers reduce lock-out/tag-out events and associated maintenance access risks.
- Case supports including lubricant selection in formal reliability-centred maintenance and process safety reviews for crushers.
Our Take
A 2.2% gain in equipment availability at a South American copper operation is material in a region where high-throughput concentrators run near nameplate; even low single-digit availability improvements typically translate into substantial extra copper tonnes without new capex.
An 83% reduction in lubricant usage suggests this gear oil change is as much a supply-chain and ESG play as a maintenance one, cutting hazardous waste volumes and transport movements that are increasingly scrutinised at large copper mines in our database.
With copper one of the most frequently covered commodities in our mining corpus, incremental reliability gains like this are becoming a competitive lever, especially as other copper-focused operators such as Boliden (in a separate European context) are also targeting efficiency and emissions reductions through equipment and consumables choices.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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