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 economiesin the world are facing severe recession for the past one and half year. During this period mostcommodity prices have tumbled by more than half from their peaks and such a sudden and severeeconomic downturn is not seen since the great depression. This sudden drop in commodity prices andlack of credit made many mining operations unviable and even those mines that are marginally viable atthis point are operating under severe cost pressures and capital expenditure restrictions.Traditionally in such severe economic situations, the industry manages the costs by adopting extremecost control measures in operational and capital expenditure. In mineral industry, costs are generallymanaged 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 anyincentive for any sub-process to increase its cost to improve the overall profitability because it does nottake 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 theoperation rather than just optimise any individual process in a mining operation. This paper explains thismethodology and discusses the benefits of such an approach on the energy consumption, green housegas emissions and the overall costs and benefits of an operation. These benefits are demonstrated byusing computer based models and case studies. The paper also discusses the challenges in successfullyimplementing such an approach to sustain the benefits.