Mining companies in the APAC region are increasingly focused on achieving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates that require them to evaluate the causes and effects of their operations, communicate outcomes, and address environmental impacts.
To meet these requirements, mining strategies must go beyond mere beyond pit optimization and incorporate ecological and biodiversity concerns. Mining companies face critical questions about incorporating ESG components, conducting evaluations and simulations, and understanding the risks of their choices.
“Dassault Systèmes is committed to promoting sustainable practices for resource extraction, product development, and recycling to create a sustainable resource lifecycle.”
We take a holistic approach to the mining industry, with a vision that encompasses three equally important aspects:
- Sustainable resources: Discovering, defining, revealing and reusing natural resources.
- Sustainable environment: Conserving and improving the environment.
- Sustainable lifestyle: Revealing sustainable urban ecosystems for inclusive governance.
Dassault Systèmes’ systems engineering approach creates a model of a sustainable planet based on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and European Taxonomy. This allows for the development and validation of cases for mining, construction, and smart cities, and is defined by four key pillars:
- Water stewardship: Monitoring water usage in industries like mining and optimizing circular use.
- Energy emissions: Modeling energy systems and solving the problems related to them, to ensure user expectations are met.
- Social values: Maintaining open and transparent communication with communities.
- Future-proofing: Ensuring sustainable land management by incorporating strategies for mine closure and waste management into short-term mining plans.
How virtual twins bring new efficiencies in mining
Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin technology supports efficient analysis of the top mining candidates and their prioritization.
“The virtual twin technology allows companies to simulate hundreds of thousands of scenarios and narrow down candidates that may yield positive outcomes across various influencing factors, including price.”
This is particularly beneficial for metals-based operations that are affected by price volatility, as it allows for adjustments to be made in response to market fluctuations. By providing insights into multiple economic parameters, the virtual twin technology can help reduce costs, generate more cash flow, and promote sustainable mining practices.
In addition to economic parameters, evaluations can be conducted for different mining strategies, such as analysis of alternative direction strategies. This can provide alternative mining strategies with benefits of cost reduction and address sustainability and mine closure. This can also help miners decide on in-pit dumping and develop a shorter haulage strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of operations.
The Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA DigitalRock tool has important applications in mining. This tool can help simulate the extraction of copper, for example, and understand the porosity of the rock it is embedded in using machine learning.
It can also help mining companies decide whether to venture beneath the surface to create smaller caves or sub caves in the rock, leveraging data to save costs.
“Virtual twin technology can also help model and simulate bottlenecks in the plant operations to eliminate them and optimize fleet management systems for better extraction of value from waste.”
Streamlining waste management for ESG
Changes to short-term processes can have major ramifications for mine closure and waste management. In terms of waste management, mining companies can build a virtual twin of the waste management system to meet ESG mandates and understand how to extract further value from waste.
By creating a virtual twin of the waste management system with cloud-based 3D visualization, mining companies can ingest and analyze all the data related to the waste dumps and conduct simulations on optimally leveraging marginal waste and lower-value materials to extract further value from waste.
source: 3DS blog
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