Por: Yhim Cerrón Piñas, consultor y Thiago Nantes, gerente de Proyectos, Compañía de Minas Buenaventura.

Abstract

Currently, one of the challenges we face as an active part of the mining industry is to avoid the occurrence of undesirable situations that may affect our employees, the environment, processes, quality and their impact on low productivity.

Compañía Minera Buenaventura's Yumpag project vision is to design a mine that will allow us to achieve this objective by having a mining camp close to the operation, having data and voice transmission systems in real time, with a reach to all subway mining workings, interconnected to the surface components, automation of the ventilation system, pumping, dumping, blasting, remote operation of equipment, an operational control center with the infrastructure to ensure the monitoring of people, equipment and processes. The latter, in turn, is interconnected with the different support areas for real-time decision making.

This design will allow us to have an operation with several identified advantages, described below:

Set challenging yet achievable goals, below-average safety indexes based on safety management from project conception, which includes the mine development, preparation and operation stages.

Regarding environmental issues, establish an Environmental Performance Indicator (EPI) based on how to optimize water use, gas emissions, energy consumption, waste generation, etc.

The processes will be sustainable and predictable, by having control over the input variables of each of the unitary activities of the mining process.

Quality is supported based on compliance with the parameters established by the company itself and customers, based on the evaluation of the variables in detail.

The result of all the above described, should allow us to have the adequate infrastructure to achieve high standards in safety and environment, high production levels with the least need of people's participation, which is reflected with a high productivity.