Experience shows that closure plans, in the time it takes for companies to reach a certain degree of maturity in incorporating the closure phase into the mine's ongoing planning (ICMM 2019), generally remain as static documents that, beyond complying with regulatory formality or with the standards promoted by the industry, are not used as a decision‐making tool in themselves.
Rather, it is understood as the final result of a mine projection, sometimes forgetting it is prepared with the information available at an early stage and it must be continuously revised to reduce uncertainties as time progresses during the mine’s lifecycle (LOM).
In this context, the development of tools that facilitate the visibility of the contents, studies, assumptions, criteria, and other variables affect both the definition of closure activities and the estimation of their costs, is essential to:
- Facilitate the review exercises of closure activities by key stakeholders, making risks and opportunities visible.
- Identify gaps and focus the use of resources on continuous improvement of planning inputs.
- Evaluate the effects generated by the identified gaps in terms of their impact on the cost of closure.
This paper presents the development of a dashboard type platform to keep key information visible in mine closure planning. This platform allows us to provide continuous access to technical, management and stakeholders information needed to identify opportunities for improvement of closure planning and thus
minimise the uncertainty that can be dragged over time if this information is not visible for management to take actions during the operation of mine.
