Mine Costs

Good ideas, Sean.  I've mentioned the Conference to my short course students, with no response forthcoming.  I'm also sending emails to certain individuals that I think will have an interest in the discussions, but no response from them as yet.  I think part of the problem is the difficulty one encounters when trying to enter the discussion.  Zoe is working on this.  Hopefully she will be able to smooth that step out a bit.

On the subject of Cost Engineering Standards, Richard Bullock presented a good discussion of standards for feasibility analyses, or lack thereof in his Jackling Lecture to SME last year.  The lecture was published as an article in "Mining Engineering" magazine, April 2011, p79.  This article sets the stage very well for discussion of the need for standards.

Although they are still a work in progress, standards for reporting of mineral resource and reserve amounts are fairly well defined and accepted worldwide, e.g. Canadian National Instrument 43-101 standards.  However, standards for calculating and reporting capital and operating cost data for proposed mining projects are virtually non-existant.  In Canadian NI 43-101 Technical Report standards, for instance, they are specified as follows in Item 25:

Technical reports on development properties and production properties must include -------- capital and operating cost estimates, with major components being set out in tabular form.

Should more stringent standards be established?  If so, how?

Taylor's Rule provides the following guideline for estimated the expected life of a mine based on its expected ore tonnage:

Life(years) = 0.2 x 4√expected ore tonnage

The life in years is commonly converted to daily production rate for estimating purposes.  Is this a reasonable way to estimate daily production rate for early prefeasibility studies?  Is there a better way? 

This link will take you to Mine Costs Online Conference

Otto Schumacher has recently run acourse entitled: Cost Estimating for Mining Feasibility Analysis. A list of resources can be viewed here.

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