Hot chips

Terry Hutson
WOOD CHIPS are in the news this week with the first ship now loading wood chips in Durban for many years plus the ‘hot’ commissioning of a new woodchip loader at Richards Bay.
The impressive Richards Bay machine can load at rates of 1000 tons per hour and is costing SA Port Operations (Sapo) around R47 million.
On site construction by Elmec Engineering began in July last year with the machine expected to be in full operation later in February. The Elmec machine will replace a 750 ton per hour Duys loader that has been in operation since 1982, leaving two new Elmec loaders on the T-jetty to efficiently handle around 5 million tons of woodchip exports from Richards Bay each year.
In Durban the new NCT wood chip facility at Maydon Wharf began loading its first ship at the weekend - the NYK dry bulker Hokuetsu Ace which will load approximately 35 000 tonnes of wood chips.
The mill has been receiving logs from the KZN Midlands since August, which have been ‘chipped’ into small pieces and stored in a giant 320m long warehouse that now dominates the Maydon Wharf skyline. The Durban plant plans to generate 360 000 tonnes of wood chips annually for an export income of up to R150 million.