Por: Giselle Vera Huapaya, Líder de Cierre de Minas, Ausenco Perú.

Abstract

The Mine Closure Plan is a complementary environmental management tool that allows delineating and designing technical, legal and environmental closure measures, as well as social programs aimed at meeting closure objectives. In this sense, the evaluation of sustainable closure alternatives of the different components, from a technical, environmental, legal/permitting, social and economic point of view, becomes relevant in the adequate planning of the closure and the optimization of the costs involved.

This paper identified and evaluated closure alternatives for a Concentrator Plant of a mining project located in Peru, considering conventional closure measures such as disassembly, dismantling and demolition, as well as transfer options, among others. The characterization of the environmental and socioeconomic conditions of the area, third party activities, legal aspects related to the evaluated alternative, and technical and economic aspects of the identified closure measures were taken into account.

The methodology used for the analysis and evaluation of the proposed closure alternatives corresponds to the multi-criteria analysis, considering evaluation criteria for the closure alternatives. As a result of the study, the most viable closure alternative was recommended from the technical, environmental, legal and economic standpoints, which allowed the estimation of the Closure Cost or Closure considering the selected option and thus reducing the estimated cost of closure planning disbursements for the mining company.

It is important to point out that the closure alternatives identified for the Concentrator Plant of the mining unit under study were based on the review of the background and environmental and socioeconomic conditions of the area where the mining unit is located, and other closure alternatives for concentrator plants located in other regions of Peru or in other countries can be considered. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to show the methodology for the identification, analysis and evaluation of alternatives using the Concentrator Plant under study as an example, so that it can be applied to other mining units as a reference.