Miners BHP and Rio Tinto have formed a Tailings Management Consortium (TMC) to develop solutions for sustainably improving tailings dewatering and management that may potentially reduce the safety risks and environmental footprints associated with tailings storage facilities.
The companies said the outlines of the partnership extend back to its first establishment in 2022, a mission to accelerate technologies and practices to increase water recovery from mine tailings, focused on high volume, filtered-tailings solutions.
In 2023, the TMC signed a new agreement that expanded its focus from a single pilot of large volume filtration to developing a portfolio of technologies that could significantly advance tailings dewatering.
Bringing their expertise and operational experience, both member companies collaborate with technology and equipment providers, technical experts, research groups and the academic sector to identify new dewatering and tailings management opportunities.
“We’ve proven dewatering equipment works at scale, but still need to solve economic hurdles and high tonnage adoption for material handling and stacking. Unlocking thick-lift compaction and optimising placement could drastically reduce costs for large-scale operations,” the two said.
“Upstream processing variables such as grind size and mineralogy will impact dewatering circuits. More work is needed to define process flow sheets that can provide a consistent feed to dewatering circuits and potentially reduce tailings volumes,” it added of its findings. “Tailings management is non-competitive, and the sector shares a passion to improve. Sharing our findings and expertise will help to improve the mining industry.”
BHP and Rio Tinto have now published two documents support industry progress in tailings dewatering, and we welcome feedback on both.
The first, Filtered Stacked Tailings: A Guide for Study Managers, provides guidance to project study managers who are evaluating filtered tailings systems. It summarises the study methodology, shares practical insights, and explains how these lessons can inform and improve filtered tailings studies. Download the Study Guide here.
The second, Unlocking Large Tonnage Filtered Tailings Stacks: A Geotechnical Perspective, is a white paper that presents a forward-looking geotechnical framework to enable the safe, stable and cost-effective deployment of large-tonnage filtered-tailings stacks – a potential game changer in reducing filtered tailings management capital and operating costs. It outlines key geotechnical knowledge gaps and proposes new ways to consider compaction techniques to achieve the required densities for large-scale operations. Download the White Paper here.
All feedback and comments can be sent to [email protected].
Source: bhp.com