M Bunyard and I Mullany
49th Annual Conference of Metallurgists, Vancouver, Canada, August 27-30, 2017.
Abstract
The pressures on mine operators are varied and constantly increasing: declining ore grades, more remote locations, and increasing environmental concerns. The challenge facing the mining industry is to find new ways to process ores that are more efficient and less costly and to control them better. This requires a fundamental rethink in the way in which projects are developed; it is no longer good enough to just copy what has been done before. The process starts with the surfacing of the primary underlying constraints for the project and the establishment of new design principles to address these. The generation of new design criteria and processing options follows the well-established path of brainstorm, focus, brainstorm, refocus, and economic evaluation. The aim is process intensification, doing more with less, as early as possible and better use of plant data. The methodology requires a complete geometallurgical understanding of the orebody to facilitate the evaluation of viable processing options. Examples of early stage processing considered are blast optimization and ore sorting to reject waste and reduce processing costs. Mine to mill optimization, which starts with the optimization of blasting for separation, offers another way to significantly reduce operating costs and increase efficiencies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CEEC acknowledges and thanks the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM), the Metallury and Materials Society (MetSoc) and organising committee for organising the COM 2017 Conference of Metallurgists hosting World Gold and Nickel-Cobalt.
Abstracts can be found at the CIM website (http://web.cim.org/com2017/conference/SessionPapers.cfm#).
Full papers published in the Conference Proceedings will be available on onemine.org, and CEEC directs readers to http://www.onemine.org/ to access and purchase published papers.