The mining industry can have a very short memory when commodity prices rise and bad habits from the mining boom glory days can easily creep back into the industry.
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Top 3 Nickel Uses – The Power Metal
Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. It belongs to the transition metals category and it is hard and malleable. The metal is extracted from its ores by heating and reducing the ore.
They Tried To Make Me Go Do Some Rehab. I Said No No Yes!
When Amy Winehouse wrote her song about rehab I am sure she didn’t have mine site rehab in mind. The principals of having a sustainable future and minimising harm however are still the same.
Over the past decade the level of Financial Assurance (FA) held by the QLD Government for mining activities has increased to $6 Billion an almost 500% increase over the 10 year period.
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Spend up big now
Right now, nobody wants to spend any capital on anything, it’s that stage of the cycle. Diesel is cheap and skills are readily available, so why spend money? Well, now is the right time to spend up big.
Longwall Production Trends – Benchmarking the Future
It’s interesting when you glance at the peaks, troughs and trends in Australian Longwall production. In just less than 20 years we have seen between 2 and 3 fold increases in total ROM tonnes with obvious economic-driven flat spots.
In a recent industry update (July 2016), “Queensland coal – mine and advanced projects” reported a 2014 – 2015 saleable coal increase of 14.7Mt to 243.6Mt compared to the previous financial year for all mining operations. The underground component – 42.6Mt, was won from 13 mines.
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Minerals Transport Infrastructure
With the exception of gold projects, large mineral deposits require bulk product transport infrastructure to get the product to market. On average they say it takes 30 years from discovery to development for a large mineral deposit. Most of this time is taken up building certainty and gaining the approvals required in order to build enough confidence to invest the capital. At any one time there are lots of projects that are waiting for certainty around the infrastructure and in many cases there are whole mineral regions that remain undeveloped.
MEC Underground Coal Delivers Mine Planning Solutions
Faced with tight customer deadlines, MEC Mining recently delivered multiple mine planning and production scenarios for a major underground coal producer. The scope included a “first principles” mine design and bottom-up productivity review for Continuous Miners and Longwall operation. Coal reserving and production scheduling of multiple scenarios were executed with XPAC which delivered the required inputs to financial modelling.
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The machines are coming!
Automation in mining has been very slow to catch on. The reason is that much of the present batch of automated machines follow a sequence rather than think for themselves. When a sensor detects something out of line, safety protocols intervene and the sequence stops, undermining their cost effectiveness. Mining is a very dynamic environment and little things like rocks on the road present a complex challenge for a pre-programmed machine.
Silver – The World’s Most Versatile Metal
Silver – that precious, shiny white metal – has traditionally been highly prized for its symbolism of wealth and prestige and its associated use in jewellery and coins. However, silver is currently much more commonly used for industrial, medical and electrical purposes, such as in household goods, solar panels and mobile phones.
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Lunch and Learn Session: Pit Optimiser for Coal and Stratified Deposits
In this session you will learn:
- Purpose of LG pit optimisation tools in the strategic planning of coal and stratified deposits
- Inputs and steps to complete a Lerch’s Grossman optimisation on a sub-block model
- Results and outputs from optimisation tools
- How to apply the results
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