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Study on financial assurance and closure cost for mine reclamation

University of British Columbia

Financial assurance for mine closure has been widely adopted by governments and companies internationally. Concern has grown in and around the global mining and mineral processing industry over potential risks associated with insufficient funding for mine closure. The motivation of this research is to review financial assurance information from several jurisdictions and to quantitatively assess closure cost for a specific example. This research address the following four objectives: 1. To carry out a literature review on financial assurance for mine reclamation. 2. To compare present regulations and policies on financial assurance for mine closure in Canada, United States and Western Australia. 3. To identify expectations for different types of mining. 4. To develop the closure approaches and apply a method to estimate and calculate the closure cost for a mine site. Main research results are as follow: a. Significant reclamation financial assurance information is highlighted, and the expectations of various stakeholder are identified for different types of mines in various jurisdictions across the world. b. Mine reclamation laws in selected jurisdictions of the Canada, United States, Western Australia have some differences and similarities in regulating agency, closure legislation, guidelines and other aspects. Regulations and policies on financial assurance for mine reclamation in the United States and Canada can be classified into prescriptive and performance-based approaches. The performance-based approach is preferred by mining companies for mine reclamation regulations. c. Developing a mine closure cost estimate requires an understanding of the site-specific closure requirements and available software can be used to perform the closure cost estimates. This study applies the Sherpa software to calculate the closure cost of a conceptual gold mine near Winnemucca, Humboldt County, Nevada. ArcGIS Software is used for calculating the size of each small surface water catchment areas for this mine. The final cost estimate for the total closure cost for the gold mine near Winnemucca, Humboldt County, Nevada is $32,417,400 including $22,574,400 direct cost and $9,843,000 of indirect cost. Considering the Gross Receipt Tax of $677,200, the total financial assurance for this project is $33,094,600. The total overhead costs account for 30.4% of the direct project costs.

Text

2017-01-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60171

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/