A scenario model for mine water management under extreme climate variability

Abstract

Managing mine water under extreme climate variability requires the capability to find trade-offs among multiple competing goals. In order to identify the relationships among these goals, we need to carry out case studies in selected mines based on those events happened in the past and those might occur in the future. However, these types of case studies are often isolated and lack of coherence when an optimal solution is sought at a regional scale with multiple mine sites. One of the key challenges is the lack of the context and scope for identifying and quantifying the causal and inter-dependency relationships among the factors that constrained the competing goals. Therefore it is difficult to capture the actual requirements which are essential to the development of a decision support system for mine water management. This paper presents a holistic approach to capturing the requirements for mine water management through the design of a scenario model for supporting case studies. The scenario model is depicted through three perspectives: the business perspective shows the mining activities and decisions according to their business hierarchies, such as within a mine or across several mines or companies. The profiles of a number of mines are collected and anonymised to form a hypothetical mining company and put into a geographical location under investigation; the environment perspective represents all the climate change patterns, such as rainfall and catchment histories and weather forecast data; the decision perspective demonstrates how alternative decisions on water management strategies would impact on the operations of the given mine sites in the selected environmental conditions. A number of case studies have been constructed based on the designed scenario model, such as the proactive water management according to weather forecasts, the assessment of the effectiveness of water sharing and trading among multiple mine sites, as well as the evaluation of the costs and benefits of establishing water management infrastructure in mine sites.