Skip to main content

Boom in Morocco's road construction materials

The strong road construction market in Morocco is helping boost the quarrying market in the country substantially. One such operation exists near the town of Ben Slimane, situated north of Casablanca. Agregat Oued Cherrat (AOC) owns a 65ha quarry, one of the largest of the 14 in the region and when the firm decided to buy new excavators, it also opted to buy Hitachi machines. AOC placed an order for one ZX330-3, with the second delivered three months later and the company now has three ZX330-3s, with a four
April 10, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
RSSThe strong road construction market in Morocco is helping boost the quarrying market in the country substantially. One such operation exists near the town of Ben Slimane, situated north of Casablanca. Agregat Oued Cherrat (AOC) owns a 65ha quarry, one of the largest of the 14 in the region and when the firm decided to buy new excavators, it also opted to buy 233 Hitachi machines. AOC placed an order for one ZX330-3, with the second delivered three months later and the company now has three ZX330-3s, with a fourth on order. Blasting is carried out every day yielding some 7,000tonnes/day and this is then loaded on to AOC's fleet of 17 trucks. In the past the site has produced 1,000,000 million tonnes/year and it is hoped that the annual output will increase to 1.8million tonnes by the end of this year with the new Hitachi machines.

The trucks unload the material into the separator, which removes the limestone from the soil. The limestone then moves on to the three primary crushers while the soil is used to refill the site. The heaps from the primary crushers are then processed through the three secondary crushers, after which the materials are further separated by two units into four different sizes of aggregates: from 0-3mm to 15-25mm.

Around 30% of the materials are delivered to companies over an average distance of 80km, but the majority is collected by customers. Some 80% of AOC's business is in the concrete sector and the remainder is dedicated to supplying aggregates to the expanding road construction market.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Building an airport for St Helena
    August 29, 2013
    The remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena will shortly benefit from the construction of a new airport as well as access roads and supporting infrastructure. This is the biggest construction project in the history of the island, which lies nearly 2,000km off the coast of Africa. The airport is expected to boost economic development for the island’s 4,000 residents with an estimated 20,000 people a year forecasted to visit this highly remote, 122km2 equatorial volcanic outcrop. At present the islan
  • Fast flyover removal with specialist demolition equipment
    July 12, 2012
    An overcrowded Indian flyover was removed in record time using specialist demolition equipment, as Patrick Smith reports Demolition of the landmark Lalbaug flyover south of central Mumbai has been completed and work on a new bigger bridge has started in India's largest city. Although the 38-year-old Sant Dnyaneshwar (Lalbaug flyover) two-lane, one-way traffic artery was serviceable and used by to 15,000 vehicles/hour, there were daily traffic jams and environmental consequences. Despite the complex and dema
  • Reducing plant noise
    February 7, 2012
    German quarrying firm Oetelshofen Kalk has cut noise emissions by half and tripled machine service life, by installing dual hardness rubber liners in its crushing plant. Based in Wuppertal, the Oetelshofen quarry company produces 2 million tonnes of limestone products/year, and has a turnover of €35 million/year.