German Matamala

Senior Associate

Germán is a qualified engineer with over 13 years of experience in open pit coal mining with experience across technical roles, covering mine design & scheduling, short/medium/long-term planning, mine & civil projects, infrastructure design, brownfield and greenfield mining feasibility studies.

Germán’s operational experience was gained at Stockton Mine, the largest opencast mine in New Zealand, located between 500 and 1,100 meters above sea level on the West Coast of the South Island. The area experiences high rainfall, cool temperatures, considerable cloud and mist, and occasional frosts and snow.

His experience includes:

• Key roles in planning, designing and coordinating of the mining and civil activities inside the Cypress mining area, a 240 Ha footprint with intensive environmental restrictions and rigorous monitoring. Complex geology, challenging topography, and heavy rainfall created a challenging mining environment.
• Production and development of the mine schedule from 1 to 12 years, using a combination of scheduling packages such as Deswik.Sched and Spry.
• Lead the process for developing and maintaining the 3 to 12 month mine schedule, compiling designs from the short-term planning engineers and building them into the scheduling package.
• Proven skills in mining software packages including Vulcan, Deswik Suite, Spry, ArcGIS, iSite and Whittle.
• Strategic planning, design, and development of challenging Millerton area, due to the presence of voids, coal seam fire’s & gases as a result of historical underground workings (circa 1900).
• Assessing, staging and supervision of the construction of a tailing’s storage facility with a capacity of 1.8M m3.
• Coaching of short-term planning engineer providing mentoring, technical support, and training.

Germán is a qualified engineer with a BE Civil (Hons) and a member of the AusIMM.