Integration of reclamation and tailings management in oil sands surface mine planning

Abstract

The processing of oil sands generates large volumes of slurry, known as tailings, that is impounded in tailings ponds. Oil sands operators are committed to develop reclamation plans to ensure that the mine site is restored to a natural or economically usable landscape. Since most of the material that is needed for capping of the tailings pond is produced in mining operation, it is reasonable to include material requirement for reclamation as part of mine planning. In this paper, an integrated long-term mine planning model is proposed that includes tailings capacity and reclamation material requirements. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to test the performance of the proposed model. The MILP model is coded in Matlab®. It is verified by carrying out a case study on an actual oil sands dataset, and has resulted in an integer solution within a 2% gap to the optimality. The resulted production schedule meets the capacity constraint of the tailings facility and guarantees the production of the required reclamation material.