Miners urged to lift their game on mine closure

The life of a mine is measured by the bounty that it brings. Its death, in effect, comes when the miner can-not turn a profit. But in mining, just as in life, death is not the end. One must seek closure. Part of a miner’s license to operate lies in its ability to remediate its deceased lease.

 

With recent changes to state and federal regulations, mine closure is now more than ever a crucial consideration.

 

The West Australian Government will have a new set of regulations in place by July and is recommending an imminent change in the way public liability for environmental remediation is offset. As it stands, the WA Department of Mines and Petroleum (DMP) does not know how many sites have or have not been closed successfully.

 

DMP director Phil Gorey told the AJM “there are currently no records kept of the mine sites which have features that are presently being rehabilitated. The Department’s new Mine Closure Planning process is being introduced to address the data gap.

 

“The potential environmental liability faced by Western Australia from closed mines in monetary terms is not known. Previously the department has not required tenement holders to undertake assessment of mine closure costs. This is a requirement which the department will impose through the soon to be released Mine Closure Plan Guidelines,” he said.

 

“There are unfortunately still examples presented to the department where good planning is not occurring and this is resulting in unnecessary costs having to be borne by the operator, these include where top soil is buried under waste dumps, or material has to be moved multiple times.”

 

The Commonwealth is introducing International Accounting Standard 137, meaning miners will have to disclose the full cost of environmental rehabilitation onto their balance sheets.

 

Professor Mark Tibbett, director of the Centre for Land Rehabilitation at the University of Western Australia said “The first thing you need to know when you open a mine is how you are going to close it. There needs to be a cradle to grave approach. Miners need to look through the whole process of mining, and part of mining is closing the mine. And many companies are lacklustre in their mine closure approaches.”

 

Professor Tibbett said that some mines execute excellent mine closures, but many are belated in their approach. “Very often they are forced to do a mine closure plan, which they then update occasionally with an extra paragraph or so. But what they don’t pursue is the research, through trials and progressive rehabilitation and working with universities and their consultants to really figure out how they can achieve a safe, stable and environmentally sustainable post-mining landscape after closure.

 

“There is a whole load of issues that need to be researched and clarified before a mine can be closed,” Professor Tibbett said, with answers needed to such questions as: “what sort of plants are you going to use to rehabilitate that landscape? Are there going to be any offsite toxicities due to acid generation? Are there any metal issues you need to deal with?

 

“Very often this work starts only three years, or five years before closure and often you will need a 20 year lead in time to get these things right. Australia is one of the world leaders in terms of mine closure considerations.

 

“Our legislation and land rehabilitation does sit at the top end of world practice with Canada and Germany, but that is not to say that we can’t do better. Our cream of the crop is really world class, but there is a huge tail from that which is not that good.”

 

Phil Mulvey, chief executive of Environmental Earth Sciences, said in a statement that Australians could end up with a billion dollar environmental clean-up bill unless mine closures are better managed.

 

He explained that current legislation demands that miners pay the relevant State government a bond, which is only returned once a mine site has been remediated to the satisfaction of the State government.

Mulvey told the AJM that ongoing assessment of land rehabilitation issues was essential to successful mine closures. “You can’t do it with assumed data in your model, you have to have actual measured data and you need calibration. If you wait until the end [to implement mine closure plans], you have to spend the next 20 years collecting it.

 

“There needs to be a change in philosophy and in the way we incentivise mine man-agers,” Mulvey explained. “The KPI of amine manager is to dig the dirt out as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible, as safely as possible with no environmental incidences. Nowhere does it say the KPI is to be achieved through mine closure, so we proposed through our lecture series a way of doing that.

 

“It is a national problem. We have just done a seminar circuit of all the states and we asked people from the industry, at each venue we went to, to nominate a mine that has been relinquished successfully in the last 30 years, and no one could.”

 

Grant Scott, director of OTEK environmental consultants declined to reinforce these claims, giving a less damning appraisal of mine closure in Australia. “The government has got pretty involved nowadays and I don’t see a lot of mines leaving these legacies for the public as much as is implied,” he said. “Mines are closed to the legislated standard, it would be out of the ordinary not to see this done.

 

“We work with the majors around the world. Some of the smaller guys, which we do a little bit of work for, need a little bit more assistance, but typically they follow a pretty concerted process.” Scott said both large and smaller miners are focused on balancing their operations and their cash flow.

 

Roger Dawson, environmental consultant for Xstract, said mine closure was just as much an issue for larger and smaller companies. “Big operators can lose sight of the objectives just as easily as the small operator. Part of the reason is the communication issue. If you are a small operator, right down to a single man operation, you don’t have communication issues and you know exactly what you agreed with the agency. Whereas if you ask a major organisation what is their final rehabilitation criteria for a site, half the time you get blank looks. So big doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, it is just being aware of what obligations you signed up to when you signed for a mining license.”

 

Dawson explained that ongoing assessment was the optimal process to follow for mine closure planning. “Regular updates of the rehabilitation plan are the best mechanism of getting actions back on track. If there are unanswered questions on how to go about something, then you can commission a study on new works for dealing with a particular land issue or contamination issue.”

 

In summary, feedback to the AJM suggests that mines need to adopt a cradle to grave approach to mine closure. The elephant in the room, however, is the impact of high commodity prices on miners’ long term plans. Who would want to close a mine permanently when remnant ore or waste might one day be highly valuable?

 

Dawson said “when it comes to the number of sites that have actually formally closed and have bonds returned, it would be a relatively small number, like very small. Part of the reason for that is companies want to maintain their lease or their holding in the advent of a change in market prices, such that the lower grade at the bottom of the pit becomes economically viable.”