MINE TO MILL PROCESS INTEGRATION AND OPTIMISATION – BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

摘要

Due to the global financial crisis, the world economy has turned upside down and most major economies in the world are facing severe recession for the past one and half year. During this period most commodity prices have tumbled by more than half from their peaks and such a sudden and severe economic downturn is not seen since the great depression. This sudden drop in commodity prices and lack of credit made many mining operations unviable and even those mines that are marginally viable at this point are operating under severe cost pressures and capital expenditure restrictions. Traditionally in such severe economic situations, the industry manages the costs by adopting extreme cost control measures in operational and capital expenditure. In mineral industry, costs are generally managed by classifying the total process into two groups, mining and milling as a separate cost centres. Such a silo based approach may not result in reducing overall costs because it does not offer any incentive for any sub-process to increase its cost to improve the overall profitability because it does not take consider the impact of one process over other downstream processes and overall cost of production. During the past fifteen years, the authors have been involved in implementing a holistic methodology “Mine to Mill Process Integration and Optimisation” to maximise the overall profitability of the operation rather than just optimise any individual process in a mining operation. This paper explains this methodology and discusses the benefits of such an approach on the energy consumption, green house gas emissions and the overall costs and benefits of an operation. These benefits are demonstrated by using computer based models and case studies. The paper also discusses the challenges in successfully implementing such an approach to sustain the benefits.