Abstract
Rio Tinto and BHP have formed a collaboration agreement to accelerate the development of technology that could significantly increase water recovery from mine tailings, and in turn reduce potential safety risks and environmental footprints associated with tailings storage facilities. As water is removed from slurry tailings by filtration, the transportation and placement of the tailings at the TSF (Tailings Storage Facility) changes from pumping and pipelines to trucks and types of conveying equipment. The transportation and placement of filter cake at the TSF can be comparable in cost, or more than, the tailings system filtration costs. These high costs are negatively impacting the implementation of filtered tailings solutions. The design of a filter cake material handling system is a multi-faceted problem which is linked to the concentrator design and the TSF design. Factors such as capacity, material properties (which are dominated by the moisture of the material), climate conditions, TSF design (including topography, seismic conditions, foundation conditions, lift height, and total stack height), and trafficability of the material all significantly impact equipment selection and the material handling system design. In a typical mining project, which is developed in multiple phases with schedule deadlines and other constraints, the opportunity and time to think innovatively can be limited. To remove some of these limitations, and as part of their partnership, the Rio Tinto and BHP team undertook a study to investigate innovative solutions to cost effectively transport and place filtered tailings at large scales. This paper describes the collaborative process, which was used to develop a potential, innovative, solution for this problem.
Authors
- Rajko Josipovic, Principal Advisor - Development & Technology, Rio Tinto, Australia
- Tony Tran - Principal Innovations (Tailings), BHP, Australia
- Todd Wisdom, Principal Consultant, SRK, USA
- Gabriel Moniz - Head of Application Engineering, BEUMER Group, USA
- Waldo Dressel - Principal, Red Earth Engineering, Australia
