Introduction: The Power of the Virtual Twin

In the beginning, sustainability was a vague, do-good notion that some reluctant mining executive had to report on every now and then. But times have changed.

Today, mining companies know that sustainability is fundamental not only to their future as a business but also to the future of our shared environment, and they are working hard to transform their activities to ensure long-lasting and responsible governance of resources. But questions still remain about exactly how the mining industry will be able to achieve true sustainability.

This series of five articles begins here with an outline of how mining companies can address the challenges of sustainability by moving to a multi-dimensional, holistic approach and using virtual twin technology to build sustainability into all aspects of mine planning and operations. The four articles that follow lay out a roadmap for employing a virtual twin to:

• collect big data
• store big data
• standardize big data, and
• use big data to create a sustainable mining future.

The challenges

The mining industry today faces a number of what might look like insurmountable challenges.

For example, in February 2022, United Nations’ Policy Brief No. 130 stated that “Since the middle of the twentieth century, the world’s population has more than tripled in size, reaching almost 8 billion people in 2022.” And that growth shows no indication of slowing down any time soon. How will the mining industry keep up with dramatically increasing global demand for diminishing resources?

In addition, as of 2020, only 8.6 % of the global economy was circular, meaning more than 90 Gt of material produced each year is not recycled. Since over half of the 100.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of natural resources that enter the global economy a year are mined materials, the mining industry has a huge role to play in eliminating or recycling waste. How can mining companies move away from the traditional “take-make-waste” linear economy while still maximising ore recovery?

Then there is the issue of mining legacies: the negative effects that mines continue to have on surrounding environments and communities long after they have closed. How can mining companies ensure the cost of end-of-life rehabilitation is built into their overall mine planning?

What can we do with the thousands of already abandoned mines around the world?

And, of course, reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains critical. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard classifies a company’s GHG emissions as:

• Scope 1 – direct emissions from owned or controlled sources
• Scope 2 – indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy
• Scope 3 – all indirect emissions not included in Scope 2 that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, including both upstream and downstream emissions.

What is the most effective way for mining companies to include emissions reports all the way from raw materials through manufacture and transport, to storage, sale, use and disposal?

The answer

We believe that finding the right answers to those challenges and questions will involve responsible mining companies adopting a holistic approach that is able to consider and balance multiple:

• Time frames – from the green field to the rehabilitated site
• Cycles – from exploration to extraction
• Scopes – from early supply chain to use of the product and end of life
• Issues – from energy systems to water stewardship, waste and legacy awareness, social considerations and resource management, and
• Parameters – a mine’s carbon footprint, for example, is linked to energy choice, fuel choice, plant running time, transport distances, site location and climate, workforce size and more.

But adopting a holistic approach to sustainability is not a simple endeavor. It will require collecting, storing and analyzing a lot of data from a lot of disparate sources, not all of which will be helpful.

To build an effective, holistic sustainability plan, mining companies need to determine:

• What their sustainability commitments (and associated KPIs) can or should be
• Which data to collect to verify their performance on those commitments, and
• What data modelling and analysis is required in order to understand where they actually are on sustainability versus where they want to be.

Future-proofing sustainability planning

Traditional data management methods, especially for large amounts of data, tend to be slow, increasing the risk that both data and assumptions may already be out of date by the time a plan is finished – and increasing the risk that the plan will not be accurate or effective.

Virtual twin technology, on the other hand, can handle huge amounts of data from multiple sources quickly and efficiently. Planners can then use that data to create an unlimited number of potential paths and quickly make an unlimited number of refinements to reflect changing data, all without losing previous work and long before any investment is made, effectively future-proofing sustainability planning.

In Article 2 of this series, we discuss how to use virtual twin technology to collect the big data necessary to adopt a multi-dimensional, holistic approach to sustainability planning.

About the author:

Delphine GONDOIN​​​​​​​ - GEOVIA Senior Strategic Planning Specialist

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