Revisiting the Geometallurgy Roadmap

It has been nearly seven years since the conclusion of the AMIRA P1110 report - an industry-led geometallurgical roadmap aimed at understanding the challenges and opportunities facing the discipline of geometallurgy. Priorities and issues identified by the project included both cultural and technical issues. Cultural issues included the existence of counterproductive disciplinary silos, a lack of case studies, poor integration of geometallurgy into the business process, geometallurgical training for mining-related students, and the lack of a regulatory framework for reporting. Technical issues included a lack of true project value optimisation, suboptimal data analysis and visualisation tools, the need for improved technologies for sensing, testing and waste rejection, and the need for improved estimation and simulation of geometallurgical parameters. In order to assess progress over the past seven years, a review was carried out of approximately 200 publications spanning both journals and conference publications, in which the publications were assessed based on the range of geometallurgical areas in which they were judged to have contributed. The review shows that significant progress has been made in a number of areas including the development and uptake of new sensing technologies and the publication of a significant number of geometallurgical case studies. Some progress has also been made in the development of new tests, better integration of geometallurgy into business processes, and extension of the benefits of geometallurgy across developments and operations. Areas of concern in which less progress has been made include the continued existence of disciplinary silos, a suitable regulatory framework for geometallurgical data reporting, true project value optimisation, and suitable data analysis and visualisation tools. Whilst this high-level analysis has several limitations, it suggests that important challenges remain in the realisation of project value from geometallurgical information, and provides support for a more rigorous update of the original study, which could include companies, service providers and educational institutions

Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity

Renewable energy production is necessary to halt climate change and reverse associated biodiversity losses. However, generating the required technologies and infrastructure will drive an increase in the production of many metals, creating new mining threats for biodiversity. Here, we map mining areas and assess their spatial coincidence with biodiversity conservation sites and priorities. Mining potentially influences 50 million km2 of Earth’s land surface, with 8% coinciding with Protected Areas, 7% with Key Biodiversity Areas, and 16% with Remaining Wilderness. Most mining areas (82%) target materials needed for renewable energy production, and areas that overlap with Protected Areas and Remaining Wilderness contain a greater density of mines (our indicator of threat severity) compared to the overlapping mining areas that target other materials. Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation

Estimating geometallurgical risk in undeveloped complex orebodies

Demand for most commodities is projected to grow in future and is unlikely to be met by discovery and recycling alone. The implied supply gap will need to be met by existing undeveloped orebodies which have not reached production due to a variety of technical, environmental and social challenges. The SMI is developing a database of undeveloped orebodies and the challenges that they face preventing their development. In the geometallurgical space it is possible to integrate a range of datasets to assess factors such as variability in ore and waste characteristics, amenability to waste rejection and the presence or absence of deleterious elements. These factors are estimated by integrating data from a range of sources including commercial mineral deposit databases, more geologically-focused and deposit type-specific databases, company technical reports and academic publications. The derived information can be used in turn to assess and prioritise research and development strategies to address these challenges. This will be illustrated using the example of over 300 undeveloped copper orebodies representing approximately 1 billion tonnes of copper metal resources. In this database there are clear examples where the key impediments relate to lack of variability, excessive variability and prohibitive levels of deleterious elements, providing a strong basis for continued development of more robust, geologically realistic and high resolution geometallurgical tools to address these challenges

Cannington Deposit 3D Deposit Atlas Dataset

This is 3D compilation of geoscience datasets for the area surrounding the Cannington Ag-Pb-Zn Deposit in the Cloncurry Region of NW Queensland. The data are compiled in Geoscience Analyst, a free program which can be obtained from the Mira Geoscience websit

Maronan 3D Deposit Atlas Dataset

This is 3D compilation of geoscience datasets for the area surrounding the Maronan Pb-Zn-Ag-Cu-Au Deposit in the Cloncurry Region of NW Queensland. The data are compiled in Geoscience Analyst, a free program which can be obtained from the Mira Geoscience websit

Ernest Henry 3D Deposit Atlas Dataset

This is 3D a compilation of geoscience datasets for the area surrounding the Ernest Henry Cu-Au IOCG Deposit in the Cloncurry Region of NW Queensland. The data are compiled in Geoscience Analyst, a free program which can be obtained from the Mira Geoscience websit

Northwest Mineral Province - update on Deposit Atlas and other compilation datasets

NW Mineral Province Deposit Atlas entries have now been made for many of the major deposits in the Mount Isa region. In this webinar, we will provide an overview of the atlas entries that have been produced to date, some of the information that has been compiled in those atlases, and applications for exploration. We will also make mention of some of the other datasets that have been compiled from previous studies in the NW Mineral Province, and how to obtain and use them