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Cost effective closure plan management for metal mines

British Columbia Mine Reclamation Symposium; University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

High closure costs have been incurred by some mines because of the failure to identify and mitigate conditions which require costly remediation on mine closure. Contaminant leaching, commonly acid rock drainage (ARD), is often a major cause of high closure costs. Planning for closure allows the remediation requirements to be anticipated sufficiently early so that the most cost effective measures can be designed and incorporated into the mine plan. Furthermore, the current regulatory trend is to bring closure costs into the operating period of a mine through some type of financial assurance or bonding requirement. The most cost effective closure plan will be the one which provides the lowest net present value of closure costs which achieves the required level of site rehabilitation on closure. This paper describes an approach to developing a cost effective mine development and closure plan. A summary of the current thinking on the main issues and control technologies for mine closure is presented.

Conference Paper

application/pdf

2009-10-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14190

Unreviewed

British Columbia Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation

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