Abstract
China has committed to peak its carbon emissions by 2030, which puts forward a new issue for underground metal mines—selecting a cleaner mining method which requires less energy and generates less carbon emissions. This paper proposes an enterprise-level model to estimate life-cycle energy consumption and carbon emissions, which takes more carbon sources (e.g., cement and carbon sink loss) into consideration to provide more comprehensive insights. Moreover, this model is integrated with the energy-conservation supply curve and the carbon abatement cost curve to involve production capacity utilization in the prediction of future performance. These two approaches are applied to 30 underground iron mines. The results show that (1) caving-based cases have lower energy consumption and carbon emissions, i.e., 673.64 GJ/kt ore, 52.21 GJ/kt ore (only considering electricity and fossil fuel), and 12.11 CO2 eq/kt ore, as compared the backfilling-based cases, i.e., 710.08 GJ/kt ore, 63.70 GJ/kt ore, and 40.50 t CO2 eq/kt ore; (2) caving-based cases present higher carbon-abatement potential (more than 12.95%) than the backfilling-based vases (less than 9.68%); (3) improving capacity utilization facilitates unit cost reduction to mitigate energy consumption and carbon emissions, and the energy-conservation and carbon-abatement potentials will be developed accordingly.
Highlights
IntroductionTo mitigate global climate change, China announced a series of ambitious long-term targets, e.g., peaking carbon emission by 2030 [4], and carbon neutrality around
The results indicate that energy conservation and carbon abatement actions for underground metal mines should primarily focus on mitigating electricity consumption, but additional attention is required to reducing the cement–sand ratio of backfilling slurry in backfilling-based mines
To peak the carbon emissions in underground mining sector by 2030, uncovering a cleaner method has been a critical concern for both mining enterprise and China’s government
Summary
To mitigate global climate change, China announced a series of ambitious long-term targets, e.g., peaking carbon emission by 2030 [4], and carbon neutrality around. This poses a new problem for China’s underground metal mines—selecting a cleaner method to extract minerals, which requires less energy and generates fewer carbon emissions [6]. Open-stope, caving, and backfilling are three conventional and mainstream mining methods for underground metal mines [7,8,9,10]. Considering the increasing public concern for surface subsidence [14], more and more projects employ the backfilling method, because it can preserve the ground surface by backfilling and supporting the void after deposit excavation [15]. Many projects initially by open stope backfill their voids subsequently, to protect the ground
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