The mine closure conference is underway in one of those tourist towns in the Rockies of Alberta. I am not there; somehow the event snuck up on me and I just could not bring myself to go to another conference where I would snooze unceasingly through dull talks in hushed and dark rooms. It is a liberating feeling to know that you have absolutely no desire to go to yet another conference.
But conferences on mine closure have a way of finding you. Andy Robertson sent me the slides of his address TOP 10 THINGS THAT GO WRONG WITH PLANS FOR MINE CLOSURE. (The link is good, but slow, so be patient.) Like all Andy’s talks it is full of interesting ideas and dire warnings. He tackles some holy grails of closure and demolishes them. The sad part is that we knew all this thirty years ago on the UMTRA Project, but then were derided. Maybe we were just not as entertaining as Andy nor were our meeting venues as beautiful. More likely, fewer mines had had to face the truths that Andy reiterates. Here are some of them.
The first to strike me is Andy’s statement that mine closure is a process, not an event. These days you need to plan for, prepare for, and actually mine for closure from the first glimmer of the mine’s birth to the last day of the last ton of ore extracted. And then you have to be prepared to be around forever to do something to try to limit the devastating forces of nature which laugh at your puny attempts to halt change.
The second point Andy hammers home is that mines are getting bigger and bigger; tailings impoundments are getting higher and higher; and thus the risks are every increasing. One of his slides notes that by the 2030s, the maximum height of tailings dam embankments will be nearly 480 meters ( I would settle for a round 500 m in predicting thus far ahead, but maybe he has a particular facility in mind.) Can you imagine the task of perpetually caring for a 500-m high earth embankment that generates no cash flow? Or defining the consequences of failure of such a structure? They will have to do that if ever they mine the Pebble Mine in Alaska.
The third point in Andy’s presentation that jolts us awake is his prediction of the consequences of proactive planning for mine closure:
- Increasingly risk-averse-based decision will control mine closure.
- Closure conditions (requirements) will dictate mine technology.
- Slurry tailings, high dams, and the use of geosynthetics will join the endangered list.
- “Closure Liability” will be as significant as “ore reserves.”
He proceeds to list and discuss the following things that go wrong in mine closure planning and implementation (best download the presentation to get the details.)
- Planning for incorrrect objectives: To avoid this anticipate trends in other jurisdictions and build in flexibility.
- Planning with flawed science. To avoid this at least recall that wetlands do not work, tailings are not impermeable and do not prevent infiltration, clay covers are fallible, and lime is not the answer to acid drainage. Keep in mind that extreme events do occur–the biggest earthquake, the largest storm, low strength layers in the foundation are real and will control in the long term.
- Planning for an event, when closure is a process. Face it, somebody will have to take custodial care of the closed mine and they will have to spend money forever looking after the site.
- Planning with inadequate financial provisions. Under-estimation is all too common. Have the estimate done by those with no conflict of interest, i.e., by those not seeking to maximize the value of the mine in the “selling” phase.
Andy recommends that if you cannot get it right the first time, you should plan to fix it the second and third time around. Soon enough we will have conference devoted to the failure of mine closure works. Rue the day!
My own thoughts prompted by looking at the presentation and writing the above: There are just some places we should not mine, because there are some places where we just cannot close the mine successfully or economically. And if we truly need the resources from a mine in a given place, we must, as a society, accept that some mined areas will have to be viewed as sacrifice zones—places forever degraded in the interests of resource development.
On a more positive note, we recall the Witwatersrand where we grew up on a mine. They have closed the mines in the sense that the headgear is gone and the slimes dams removed to be reworked and consolidated in giant new impoundments. But the mine workings are still there and groundwater is and will perpetually be different. What was once barren veld is now a sea of humanity living and working in dense urban areas that cling to the line of mines that once were along the edge of the vast basin of gold. Had the Boers or the British of 1890 talked of mine closure, they would have had no way to predict what did develop. And if they had had the ability to predict what is today the Witwatersrand, they would have had to conclude that this was destined to become a new place, a new way of life, and they would have had to face the reality of sacrifice of the loneliness of the veld for the roar of cities.
So too today, societies and places where there are vast ore bodies should debate changes of so great a scale as the change of the Witwatersrand from veld to city. Can you imagine an Alaska where six million people cluster in the dense urban settlements that develop around the long-forgotten mine? Anglo did it once; they could do it again in a different place. All the while branding closure as a process and not an event.
Interesting thoughts, especially related to the Pebble Mine project. I think secretly you may be suggesting that the upper reaches of the Koktuli River and Talarik Creek are a “sacrifice zone” because of the incredible, never-before-seen-in-Alaska risks of closing Pebble. However, there is a consumption conundrum, that forces us to consider the effect of the transnational trade and exploitation of metals that links us Iphone users with those in thirty randomn mines around the world. And how can be judge a sacrifice zone AFTER the world-class deposit is discovered? I believe there is still too much to learn about the Bristol Bay watershed and the economics of mining the deposit, but the current social/political debate is all media-based faff. Thanks for your thoughts..
so much of this, to me, comes back to process, with closure as an integral component. We’re quite good at analysis but lousy at synthesizing our technical knowledge into coherent sustainable and socially acceptable projects. Look at the way we produce technical documentation for projects – a sea of poorly inter-connected pieces that are painful to review and often based on poor processes that pay lip service to community engagement. No wonder the public mistrusts our business.
This is grist for the continuous conference sites!
And while we’re about it how about a plug for deep sea disposal as the lesser of the evils?
I had thought that early stage closure planning was usually done by highly paid consultants hired by the company. Yet Andy points out the flaws of “flawed science” and :”inadequate financial provisions”. Shouldn’t the consulting industry take some ownership here and maybe develop a registry of imcompetent consulting firms to help companies get proper guidance? In fact many of the ten items relate to what direction and advice companies are given. If an advisor tells the company that their closure is relatively simple then they will obviously assume that it is. If an advisor tells the company that their impacts will be minimal (as part of the ESIA process) then they will obviously assume that it is.
Salient observations all. The earth disturbances that accrue to mining become greater with each passing each decade. If we choose to neglect them the disturbances will disappear from sight and remembrance over the course of centuries, but for those centuries there will be impacts, generally negative relative to the pre-mining ecology of the site. As a culture we’ve chosen not to ignore the adverse impacts of mining and to varying degrees we’ve legislated site restoration controls. The vision that describes the goals of the controls is created in the context of national agendas that universally favor the near-term creation of jobs and mineral sales wealth. Road-rail-power infrastructure and worker accommodation expenditures are subsidized to promote the wealth creation agenda, and then, when the ores are depleted, the abandonment “bust” process ensues. A skeleton crew is left behind to address the restoration of the mine-site to the standards developed in the pre-mining era by individuals and organizations operating in a context of economic reasonableness and, very often, personal aggrandizement. Other than the mining companies legislated restoration responsibilities the rest of the abandoned works (the town, et al) are subjected to no restoration protocol and a “ghost town” is left behind. This is the present condition. Any Consultant or Regulatory Authority that asks for a better accounting of the whole of the restoration process will be dis-enfranchised by those that want to create near-term wealth, call things “good,” and move on to better digs given their newly created wealth. So it is in my mind that a wonderful opportunity is lost because there is no planning authority that can see the whole picture of the disturbance as an opportunity to found a human settlement for Seven-Generations at the site. The authority would recognize the societal advantage to leveraging its subsidized infrastructure to keep the people on the site for centuries after the demise of the mine now that the accouterments of civilization have been brought to the site. The question is “how” to create wealth at the site after the demise of the ore reserve; the answer is in the energy infrastructure of the site. Imported energy creates no advantages for the town and its peoples; what must happen is the mine itself must create an ambient (site-natural), renewable power system over the course of its operation as a part of its legacy. One example of such a legacy would be the creation of terraced, solar thermal or photovoltaic equipped, tails piles, built out over the c ourse of the first decade of mine development, devoted to operation of the mine until, at the time of mine demise, they’re granted free-and-clear to the town. The site-renewable power taken from the inherited power system would operate for the cost of maintenance only, and power consuming manufacturing would be expected to re-locate to the site of best power advantage. The town would be expected to live and prosper; the assets of the early-on subsidized roads-rails, combined with the mine-life subsidized creation of power for the ages, would be parlayed into a “sustainable” place of work for generations to come, all because the “authority” created a vision for restoration and long-term wealth creation at the site.
Buckminster Fuller said the mining engineering” education was one of the two best educations a person could receive (the other was ship captaincy, as taught at the Naval Academy) because mining engineers were responsible for the creation of “whole systems” in the remote places of the earth. The mining engineer is in effect a site captain and he/she is responsible for all aspects of human survival and prosperity at a site in deference to the need for intelligent, healthy humans to operate the ore extraction and reduction works. We mining engineers need to look one step beyond our present limited vision of “near-term” wealth creation to design for “long-term” wealth creation as well.