Optimal pitwall profiles to maximise the overall slope angle of open pit mines: the McLaughlin Mine

Agosti, Andrea; Utili, Stefano; Valderrama, Cristóbal; Albornoz, G.

doi:10.36487/acg_repo/2135_01

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The introduction of new optimization methods may allow a more seamless approach for the inclusion of slope angle variability based on pit depth as part of optimization, rather than the current approach where a fixed value must be applied before ahead of the optimization step. Developments in slope stability inputs for open pit optimization such as the optimal slope profiles presented by Agosti et al (2021) for generating varying slope profiles with depth may be used to further optimize early pushbacks in mining schedules.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical Modelling for Improved Open Pit Optimization

Jackson¹

2023

Proceedings of the TMIC 2022 Slope Stability Conference (TMIC 2022)

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Simple open pit optimization using industry standard approaches (e.g. Whittle or NPV scheduler) provides a range of pit shells for an engineer to evaluate and select an optimal pit, and/or interim push backs to which a mine design can be developed. The first optimization step requires the definition of an overall slope angle condition that must be met by any pit shell output by the software. The issue with this is that the inability to increase slope angles for smaller pit shells, may result in a suboptimal early production schedule. This paper outlines how the use of custom slope stability curves generated using numerical modelling techniques can be used to estimate slope angles for sequential pit shells, to generate a slope angle optimized 'pit-by-pit' graph. This would allow for maximum flexibility in mine planning focused on increasing revenue in initial push back designs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical Modelling for Improved Open Pit Optimization

Jackson¹

2023

Proceedings of the TMIC 2022 Slope Stability Conference (TMIC 2022)

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“…Therefore, the adoption of the optimal profiles leads to increases of NPV ranging from 4% (case with CO 2 tax = 50 AUD/tCO 2,eq ) to 8% (case with CO 2 tax = 30 AUD/tCO 2,eq ). Note that unlike in Agosti et al (2021bAgosti et al ( , 2021a and Utili et al…”

Section: Key Financial Indicators and Production Schedulementioning

confidence: 93%

“…Images are available in colour online. employed for the strategic design of other two mines (Agosti et al 2021b(Agosti et al , 2021a. The procedure, which is recalled in Figure 1, is the same irrespective of the shape of the pitwall profile adopted, i.e.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, a fundamental limitation of the studies listed above is the assumption that the shape claimed to be optimal is found as the shape associated with the highest stability number among curves belonging to a very restricted family and the assumption of uniform slope. More recently, Agosti et al (2021aAgosti et al ( , 2021b and Utili et al (2022) employed a novel geotechnical software, OptimalSlope (Utili 2016), that computes the slope optimal profile for any specified lithological sequence without unduly restricting the search to any predefined family of shapes to design the pitwalls of three open pit mines achieving important increases of NPV and carbon footprint reductions in comparison with the traditional design based on planar pitwalls. To be able to quantify the gains of NPV and carbon footprint reduction in a consistent way in Agosti et al (2021bAgosti et al ( , 2021a and Utili et al (2022) the open pit mines considered were designed twice employing the same pit optimizer software, economic parameters and optimization strategy, with the only difference between the two designs being the pitwall profiles adopted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, Agosti et al (2021aAgosti et al ( , 2021b and Utili et al (2022) employed a novel geotechnical software, OptimalSlope (Utili 2016), that computes the slope optimal profile for any specified lithological sequence without unduly restricting the search to any predefined family of shapes to design the pitwalls of three open pit mines achieving important increases of NPV and carbon footprint reductions in comparison with the traditional design based on planar pitwalls. To be able to quantify the gains of NPV and carbon footprint reduction in a consistent way in Agosti et al (2021bAgosti et al ( , 2021a and Utili et al (2022) the open pit mines considered were designed twice employing the same pit optimizer software, economic parameters and optimization strategy, with the only difference between the two designs being the pitwall profiles adopted. Financial and environmental gains were calculated as the difference between the NPV, carbon footprint and energy consumptions resulting from the two designs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of carbon tax and optimal slope profiles on profitability and emissions of open pit mines

et al. 2022

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This paper investigates the financial and environmental consequences stemming from the introduction of a carbon levy applied to mining and processing activities. The novelty is twofold: (1) the effect of a carbon tax, proportional to the emissions produced by all relevant mining activities, is accounted for in the determination of the Ultimate Pit Limit (UPL), i.e. the environmental costs are not applied a posteriori to pit optimization but included concurrently to Net Present Value (NPV) maximization, allowing to investigate the relationship between carbon tax value versus NPV, amount of ore extracted and carbon emissions; (2) we use a new software, OptimalSlope, to automatically determine geotechnically optimal profiles for the mine pitwalls. The Marvin copper deposit (block model data publicly available from MineLib repository) was adopted as a case study. Several pit optimizations were performed based on four different values of carbon tax and adopting either traditional planar or non-linear optimal pitwalls. It emerges that the relationships between carbon tax value versus NPV, amount of ore extracted, and carbon emissions exhibited linearity in both cases of planar and optimal pitwall profiles. Moreover, the adoption of optimal profiles realizes gains up to 215 million AUD, without compromising the safety of the UPL.

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Machine learning for open-pit mining: a systematic review

Liu,

Kozan

et al. 2024

International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environment

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Optimal pitwall profiles to maximise the overall slope angle of open pit mines: the McLaughlin Mine

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Numerical Modelling for Improved Open Pit Optimization

Numerical Modelling for Improved Open Pit Optimization

The effect of carbon tax and optimal slope profiles on profitability and emissions of open pit mines

Machine learning for open-pit mining: a systematic review

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