Moving Towards Parametric Mining
Sustainable technologies such as solar and wind energy require more minerals than today’s current carbon-based, fossil fuel energy systems demand. Mining must accelerate supply of these crucial mineral resources to meet the world’s sustainability goals, and sophisticated data-driven models, including parametric design, can help do that.
Minerals Fuel Future Energy Needs
The typical electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs as its fossil fuel-based equivalent. It is estimated that, to meet Paris Agreement goals over the next two decades, there will be a demand increase of more than 40 percent for copper and rare-earth elements, a 60-70 percent demand increase for nickel and cobalt and almost 90 percent increase in demand for lithium than is being mined today. This demand increase is directly linked to global digital technology development. Mining must supply these minerals while also digitalizing its own operations to achieve end-to-end sustainability.
Minerals used in selected clean energy technologies - source
Mine More, Emit Less, Work Safer, Move Faster
These are significant challenges. How do miners ramp up production safely and responsibly while reducing carbon footprint? Mining electrification is a huge first step. Lifetime greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electric vehicles are half their combustion engine counterparts, and this lifetime GHG emission could further be reduced an additional 25 percent with the production of low-carbon electricity technologies.
Electrification enables a powerful trifecta of benefits in the areas of environment, health and economics that create enormous opportunities for operational cost savings, innovative mine designs and resilience against uncertainty. It will reduce human exposure to carcinogenic diesel particulates and reduce scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 100 percent. The value increases productivity in existing assets, while improving a company’s ability to unlock deeper and more remote ore bodies. Clean energy electrification facilitates precision automation and the digitization of mine operations, while improving environmental and health outcomes.
Electricity breeds invention, including new equipment design and design methods. Electricity conveys information and data for monitoring, reporting, control, simulation, and automation, a capability that gets miners out of reacting and into anticipating next moves.
To achieve sustainability, mining must innovate and that means doing things differently, which is inherently risky. Electrification and digital transformation enable virtual twin simulation to test new ideas before building them, which reduces risk and helps inform decision-makers better and faster.
Average GMG emissions by commodity and life-time GHG emissions - source
The Road to Sustainability
Advanced automated parametric mine design is part of this transition toward process automation integrated with cloud platform computing, simulation, robotics and scientifically accurate virtual twin modeling of real-world objects and systems in a fully electrified mine system that delivers the right information to the right place at the right time, instantly.
Automated design updates help people make better strategic decisions. Engineers can build more realistic plans because they can quickly simulate multiple “what if” scenarios using the latest information. More realistic plans improve throughput, reduce waste, and optimise costs while helping to ensure that production and quality targets are met.
The automation provided by parametric design enables mining companies to evaluate various scenarios for mine electrification, to simulate their 4D progressive closure model, or to optimize ore loss and mitigate dilution. Parametric design allows for the full digitization of the mine, its surrounding geography, and downstream processes. This digitization helps mining companies accelerate mineral mining while reducing their own carbon footprint.
Solutions for a Complex Future
The adoption of parametric design within the mining industry brings welcome innovation at a time when mining companies are trying to responsibly accelerate mining projects. As mining companies look to reduce time to market and address marginal economic deposits, social and ESG challenges, they must also reduce reliance on traditional mine planning tools and embrace new and innovative technologies emerging with clean energy transformation.
Our solution, Strategic Mine Design, uses parametric design and provides tools to automate the mine design process to save time and resources.
In this series, we have explored how parametric design accelerates the mine design process. This design approach allows planners and engineers to quickly create and evaluate multiple design models. Parametric design represents a key technology the industry needs to help mining evolve, continue to prosper and achieve its long-term goals for responsible and sustainable mining operations.
Parametric Design Strategic Mine Design
Christina LUDWICKI is a Mining Industry Process Consultant at Dassault Systèmes GEOVIA with 15 years of experience in Industry and Consulting. Christina holds a BEng in Mining Engineering from Dalhousie University. Throughout her career, she has worked in various aspects and methods within the mining industry, from mine planning in narrow vein gold mines, to feasibility studies of large Block Caves and Sub-level Caves. Christina is now focused on developing cross brand synergies across the DS portfolio to deliver maximum value to the mining industry.
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