Implementing an Innovative Approach to Tailings Dewatering

Speakers: Phil Newman, Head of Tailings Innovation, Anglo American
Mark Bruton, Senior Geotechnical Engineer, KCB
James Purrington, Associate Director – Tailings, WSP

Explain that the future of tailings management is being driven by a higher degree of scrutiny and oversight than ever before, and for good reason. The need to design large geotechnical landforms that will stand up to the test of nature for the long term are not the type of geotechnical conditions that most geotechnical engineers are used to. The safe design of tailings storage facilities is not only critical to the mining industries success, factors including sustainable water stewardship and planning for closure are at the forefront of tailings management. These focus areas are driving change and innovation in the tailings space, but innovation in mining is hard, particularly at the back end of the process where the scale of waste management dwarfs most industries. For the last 6 years Anglo American has been developing the proof of concept for an innovative approach to tailings management that aims to address the three key focus areas of safety, water stewardship and closure; without the cost of existing technologies such as filtered tailings. Hydraulic dewatered stacking (HDS) looks to utilise a specific by-product from the mining waste stream and repurpose it within the tailings facility design, to accelerate consolidation, increase the rate and desaturation and reduce the overall degree of entrainment of water in the tailings mass. The presentation will provide an oversight of the approach and the proof of concept to date, from laboratory to a 250,000 ton large scale field trial. We will detail some of the challenges of innovating at scale, the results from the trials so far, and where we can go from here.