From London and the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) comes their newest publication Planning for Integrated Mine Closure: Toolkit.
If you have not hitherto read about or thought about planning for mine closure, this new volume is an excellent place to start. The first five chapters take you at an even pace through the reasons why you should plan for closure from start to finish of a mine. The chapters set out the steps towards formulating a cost-effective and responsible closure plan. Then you are told how to implement this plan and why you should do so.
I believe that if every mine, everywhere implemented the policies and procedures so well set out in this volume, that there would be no more closure scandals, no more mine Superfund sites, no more abandoned mines and programs, and plenty of nice places to go recreate where once there was a mine.
A criticism of this volume; but a small one for those who have long thought and struggled with planned mine closure: there is nothing new or valuable in the text. But even that criticism makes you realize the truth of this observation from the volume:
Mine closure remains a challenging subject, despite clear recognition of good practice by operations and external stakeholder and the technical ability of companies to achieved recognized good practice. Many of the challenges are posed by the context or situation of a mine or mine development rather than by technical challenges and further dialogue on these issues from the users of this document is needed.
Which is a long and convoluted way of saying that we engineers and scientists can close mines given time and money, but management and budgets, regulators and un-reason, and hysterical NGOs get in the way.
The most valuable part of this new volume is the so-called “toolkit” of Section 6. Here again not much new, but nevertheless a useful collation of ideas, checklists, and best practice approaches. If you do what is inherent in the toolkit, nobody can accuse you of irresponsibility—you can justifiably claim to be mining responsibly.
One example: I would never have thought to include in a closure plan all the things that are listed in Tool6 – Typical headings for contextual information in a conceptual closure plan. If you look at only one page of the ICMM volume look at this list on page 64.
Some cynical observations prompted by this volume: The idea of planning for closure is not new. Nor are the arguments in favor of integrated mine planning. And surely there is nothing new in the fact that few, if any, mines do anything about it. It may make holistic sense, but it is generally not good for the shareholders. Unless the regulators demand a fully funded closure plan, forget it.
Many jurisdictions these days demand a closure plan that is updated regularly. This is good common sense for any political jurisdiction in which mining occurs. I suggest it should become good common sense for any investor as well. How else to know what hidden liabilities cloud the rosy financial outlook of the company in which your retirement monies are invested?
PS: The image of a golfer that appears at the top of this post is from an advert for a the Mine Closure Hanbook from 2007 from Outokumpu. Here is 180 pages of mind-numbing detail. They even tell you how to do a slope stabilty analysis on the closed tailings impoundment.
The second image is from the SES website. My daughter is now working from them, and I can attest they are damn good consultants to the mining industry at all stages of operation including closure.
These are the kinds of materials that should be distributed to the media. Oftentimes they get the full story from the perspective of environmentalist groups, but rarely do they get the entire picture of how responsible mining companies engage in preventive and remediation measures to minimize impact in their concession areas.