Economic feasibility valuing of deep mineral resources based on risk analysis: Songtao manganese ore - China case study

Abstract

The exploitation of deep mineral resources is an inevitable choice under economic development and resource shortage. Assessing the economic feasibility of deep mineral resource exploit projects is a prerequisite for resource industry development. Mining industry have some problems influence its economic feasibility, including long mining period, high infrastructure investment and lack flexibility, and have risks of geology instability and economic reserve degrade. On the other hand, with the increase of the buried depth of mineral resources, some problems have intensified the uncertainty of the profit of deep resource utilization project, such as high stress, high lithology, high temperature environment, and increase of upgrading cost. Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) are traditional economic evaluation means which difficult to identify and assess risks precisely. Decoupled Net Present Value (DNPV) provides an efficiency tool to separate the time value and risk cost which is helpful to finds the real value of projects. A manganese mining project which is located Guizhou province, China is analyzed, paper choices several mainly risks of influence expected revenue to analysis project feasibility based on the DNPV technology, which includes the thickness of ore body, ore grade, market price, operation cost and nature disaster. The cost of potential environmental risk (carbon emission cost) also is analyzed. Paper constructs a risk management framework by risk identify, assess and classification, and analyzes the corresponding measures to reduce risk costs. The mainly risk cost of study case from market price shock and unexpected ore grade decline, which accounting for 80% of the total risk cost. In the process of deep mineral resources exploit, effective cost control measures can reduce the risk cost to a certain extent, including improving productivity, reducing unit cost of ore, improving mine sustainability and exploration accuracy. Green mineral construction is a feasible direction of deep resource utilization. For improve the accuracy of economic feasibility evaluation of deep mineral resources utilization, further improvement is needed in the selection and construction of different risk assessment models.