Today’s mines are deeper, wider and bigger than ever before as miners look for big mineral deposits and big projects to build around them. However, the ground the mining industry works on is never stable. Whether it is geological uncertainty, volatile commodity prices or geopolitical shifts, uncertainty plays a central role in the industry.

“The biggest challenge is something called radical uncertainty,” said Scott Dunbar, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering. “You have no idea in some cases what’s there or what’s coming. These are the unknown unknowns. There are also known unknowns [that] you have no way of characterizing. There are going to be problems, but you don’t know when they will happen.”

While mining companies currently try to be as efficient as possible, flexibility offers another path forward that could help miners better adapt in the face of uncertainty and unlock new potential for the industry.

Little room for flexible planning

For Andy Reynolds, president of Inspire Resources, an Alberta-based management consulting company, the major challenge is that the mining industry currently does not evaluate uncertainty in a way that would allow for more flexibility in mine planning. “There are essentially two ways of dealing with uncertainty,” he said. “One is to try and make yourself as efficient as possible so that if times get hard, everybody else fails first. That’s the way the industry works.”

The second way is to try to make yourself as adaptable as possible so that you can change as things change externally. “This alternative way is usually more expensive and looks less efficient in a steady state scenario—in other words, if you have a flexible system and things don’t change, [then] you have overinvested and it’s more expensive than it needed to be,” he said.

When mining companies assume that all variables will remain the same, they tend to choose efficiency over flexibility because it comes with a lower cost. “The major shortcoming is that we’re in denial about change and uncertainty, or we abstract it away,” Reynolds said. “But the world is changing, and that is getting a bit difficult [to do].”

According to Reynolds, flexibility and adaptability in mine planning boil down to an understanding of how to do things differently in the face of changing circumstances. Yet often, the current system of mining prevents this understanding and flexibility from becoming common practice. The regimented process that takes a project from feasibility to detailed engineering, construction and years of planned operations is at odds with the countless variables that change over the course of those many years.

“We tend to favour economies of scale, which means building things really big and making big upfront investments, and that tends to lock us in,” he explained. “When we build a mineral processing plant with a gigantic semi-autogenous grinding mill in the middle of it, everybody becomes a slave to the mill because if you don’t keep that mill fed, then you’re losing money hand over fist. But if you had 10 smaller mills, you would have a lot more flexibility to do different things.”

The mine design process is often very set, with little to no room for deviations. For Dunbar, who researches how technical and business paradigm changes can be combined to mitigate the challenges the industry currently faces, the overall system is constrained by commitments of time and money, which prevents flexibility from being part of the mine design process.

According to Dunbar, retrieving and extracting metals or materials through alternatives to the “drill, blast, load, haul, dump” process could offer another approach to mine planning. One example is in-situ recovery, where the metal or material is extracted without moving ore. Another is near-situ recovery, where the ore is processed in small, mobile and modular plants located near the points of ore extraction. “The technology is available to design equipment to do this,” he said. “Such a system would have the flexibility to adapt.”

Economies of scale, or the cost advantages from larger production volumes, add to the current inflexibility. “It’s ‘go big or go home,’” Dunbar said of the current mine planning system. “[If] the deposit and the equipment you are using do not fit that model, it is just too expensive. That’s a major constraint, and we have to learn to think of ways of making things smaller or doing things in smaller chunks, because the smaller things are, the more adaptable they are.”

Of course, when the mine becomes operational, the process of extraction is another opportunity to adopt a more flexible, iterative approach to planning. However, inflexibility in the face of economies of scale can also trickle down to mining technology, as often contemporary mining equipment is not set up either for smaller operations or for flexible and novel ways of tackling potential issues. There is also a disconnect between long-term mine plans and short-term, or operational, plans.

According to Roussos Dimitrakopoulos, a professor at McGill University’s mining engineering program and director of the COSMO Stochastic Mine Planning Laboratory, “state-of-the-art methods in dealing with supply (geological) and demand (market) uncertainty make a substantial contribution in managing uncertainty and quantifying risk and they are available to the mining industry.”

He highlighted the KPI-COSMO Stochastic Mining Optimizer as an advance planning tool to improve both ore production and net present value (NPV). Going forward, he said he sees research advancing on the interaction between short-term and long-term mine complex production planning. How operations integrate the two can affect how long-term production plans can be adapted based on new learnings and updates.

“If I don’t connect the two parts, it makes it very difficult to know where I stand a year later,” he said. “How close am I to what was going on and why should I believe that next year’s forecast will be as good as I expect? The flexibility in this context becomes, ‘how do I link operational aspects with long-term planning?’ That is typically not done particularly well, thus new technologies are needed to address this issue, which led to our research into the self-learning mining complex.”

Exploring models for more flexible approaches

Through Inspire Resources, Reynolds has been exploring what flexibility and adaptability in mining could look like. Describing itself as a “technology-enabled adaptation company,” Inspire Resources leverages modelling, simulation and participative social processes to help companies improve adaptability. It has worked with OZ Minerals, an Australian mining company that was acquired by BHP in 2023, and Novamera, a mining technology company that specializes in surgical mining technologies and “small-footprint, turnkey” mining solutions.

When it comes to facing uncertainty, Reynolds said that simulation is key, either through off-the-shelf simulation tools or writing and developing one’s own code, which Inspire Resources does.

“It’s the upgrade in the skills that are needed to give flexibility a fair shot,” Reynolds explained. “The key point is that flexibility is usually a trade-off against efficiency in the steady state. It has an economic value that can be calculated, but only if you have the methods to calculate it.”

The company began working with OZ in 2020, which that same year had created its Think & Act Differently (TAD) incubator to facilitate innovation in the mining industry; one objective was to investigate scalable, adaptable and modular opportunities for mining. Over several years, Inspire Resources worked with OZ, doing modelling and simulation to help the company understand what flexibility means, as well as how to quantify and take advantage of it.

A key component of the partnership was developing a structure for OZ’s scalable and adaptable strategy, according to Reynolds. Inspire Resources conducted a study that investigated what modularity could look like at a mining operation.

“We concluded that flexibility is a whole-system question,” Reynolds said. “There is no one piece of equipment that will make an inflexible system flexible. You have to architect it from the beginning. The obvious question was, what does that look like?”

OZ turned this question into an innovation challenge through its TAD incubator, called the Scalable & Adaptable Challenge. Seven companies were invited to take part, and over the course of nine to 12 months, the challenge participants developed a simulated system of mineral extraction and processing based on a satellite deposit at OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill copper-gold mine in South Australia, which had already been mined. The results were published in a July 2022 white paper.

“We subjected that simulation to disruption and change and [asked] what the flexibilities that were designed into this were, and how much they were worth,” Reynolds said. “We demonstrated two important things. One was that you could calculate and put an economic value on flexibility. The other is that you can build an alliance of collaboration partners to co-design a whole system together.”

Inspire Resources is currently working with Novamera, having created and sold software to the mining technology company that helps it evaluate its projects and optimize extraction plans.

“Essentially, it’s taking a different approach,” Reynolds explained. “Conventionally, you would look at the ore in the ground, optimize the stopes and then design the access to get to them. What we did was to take the ore in the ground and then look at all of the possible extraction paths and evaluate them all, and just punch holes through that block model and just run a lot of computationally intensive calculations. As a result, we can take several weeks of work and collapse it down to hours and sometimes minutes.”

Since Novamera specializes in helping mining companies turn projects that are deemed uneconomical to mine—such as narrow-vein mineral resources—into ones that generate a return on investment, this is key. Inspire Resources and Novamera are currently working on developing the software further to test how to respond to uncertainty and change.

However, having a more flexible mine plan goes beyond the current technologies and mine planning systems miners use. According to Reynolds, managing that flexibility and knowing how to respond to change is key.

“You can’t really calculate the value of flexibility without knowing how you’re going to use it,” he said. “It really comes down to management decision logic; ‘if this happens, I will change the plan to this, or if this happens, I’ll change the plan to that.’ You need to know what your alternative plans could be.”

For Dimitrakopoulos, as miners operate and gather additional information, including from sensors that monitor several aspects of mining operations, two issues need to be addressed. “First, the updating of all models and performance indicators, including uncertainty quantification from grade simulations to equipment performance, is required,” he said. The technology to do this exists, he noted.

“Then, the uncertainty-based adaptations of the existing short-term plans need to be updated. This is seen as the self-learning mining complex, based on established methods such as stochastic mine planning as well as integrated techniques from machine learning.”

Dimitrakopoulos added that an algorithm can be developed to allow a mine planning system to obtain information from equipment and production sampling sensors to see how things have been performing. “That then becomes, in a sense, a self-learning mining complex,” he said. “Then you can find a way to take this learning and see how you [can] adapt the short-term plans that you made before you developed this information and before the learning. That provides extremely interesting results because suddenly you see that the sequence of what [will be] mined next week and the [week after] becomes different than before.”

Of course, the initial mine plan determines which operational decisions miners can take, and inevitably creates constraints. Yet, according to Reynolds, miners do already show some intuition for flexibility and how it can benefit the mining process.

“I believe one of the reasons why miners prefer wheeled vehicles over conveyors underground, even though they’re less efficient, is that wheeled vehicles are more flexible,” Reynolds said, as an example. “That’s kind of an intuitive decision that they’re willing to pay the extra cost [for] because when the mine plan changes, they don’t have to buy new conveyors; they can just send [the vehicles] on a different path.”

What flexibility can unlock for mining

A more flexible approach to mine design and planning could have more benefits than just allowing miners to better adapt to potential changes throughout the life of mine. Dunbar also believes that it could lead to decreased waste production, more efficiency in the operation over time and potentially a smaller environmental footprint.

Beyond the economic and environmental benefits, Reynolds said that the “most attractive” part of flexibility in mining is the social and community benefits. “When we’re flexible, we create mutual social obligations and strong bonds of trust and partnership, which is exactly what we need around mining,” he said.

Demonstrating that flexibility can help mitigate some of the social licence uncertainty at the beginning of a project, especially around local knowledge. “You just cannot expect to know everything at the beginning of a project, and yet we design and plan mines for the next however many years as if we already know everything we need to know,” Reynolds said. “There’s a great deal we can do to improve the support that we have as an industry by showing that we can adapt, accommodate and make changes when people need us to do that.”

Another major benefit of more flexibility in mine planning is that it might help unlock more of the critical minerals needed for the energy transition. While Canada is working hard to be a global leader in this space, there is still a long period of time between finding mineral deposits and developing them into mines.

“These deposits of rare earth elements, and even some other deposits of [critical metals like] zinc and nickel, [are] small,” Dunbar said. “They are not the big ‘elephants’ everybody likes to see, and we’ve got to learn to deal with those. There are a lot of deposits out there that have been claimed and [drilling done], but nobody’s interested [in developing them into mines] because [they are] just too small.”

Dunbar said if the industry needs to produce critical minerals as much as it says it does, it should be looking at innovative ways to extract the materials, such as in-situ or near-situ recovery, or perhaps bringing small mobile processing plants to the deposit—something that goes beyond traditional thinking on mine planning. “We just have to really open it up,” he said. “That’s the only way I see these deposits being exploited.”

For Dimitrakopoulos, flexibility in how mining companies assess deposits, generate strategic plans, do short-term production planning and optimize—not just an individual mine but a mining complex—can result in greater ore production and unlock significantly higher NPV.

“We have a range of possible production forecasts for key performance indicators that can be higher or lower, so we have the ability to assess what could happen in different scenarios in the future,” he explained. “If you use the more advanced methods—such as the simultaneous stochastic optimization of mining complexes and the self-learning mining complex—you can quantify risk in forecasts and plans. This is a way to improve mine plans and forecasts for any case, and to me it is also important that these developments may make marginal cases profitable, particularly for critical mineral cases.”

Looking forward to future-proofing

To get to a more flexible place for mine planning and design will require large-scale changes, not just in terms of technological development but also in terms of shifting priorities and processes. Namely, the industry will need to be receptive to new possibilities. “[The whole industry is] in a box, and we have to start getting outside that box and think about other possibilities,” Dunbar said.

In a world that is in flux, both environmentally and geo­politically, this is especially necessary. “I think we have to always go back to Charles Darwin’s quote on this, where he made clear that the survival of the fittest doesn’t mean survival of the most efficient, it means survival of the most adaptable to change,” Reynolds said.

“We are going to have to be a lot more adaptable, and every time we try to build something big and expensive with very detailed plans a long way into the future, we just make ourselves a hostage to fortune. In a world that is less [stable], flexibility has greater value, so you should be thinking more about flexibility than about efficiency.”