National Mining Association Research Articles

Managing health and safety risks: Implications for tailoring health and safety management system practices.

As national and international health and safety management system (HSMS) standards are voluntarily accepted or regulated into practice, organizations are making an effort to modify and integrate strategic elements of a connected management system into their daily risk management practices. In high-risk industries such as mining, that effort takes on added importance. The mining industry has long recognized the importance of a more integrated approach to recognizing and responding to site-specific risks, encouraging the adoption of a risk-based management framework. Recently, the U.S. National Mining Association led the development of an industry-specific HSMS built on the strategic frameworks of ANSI: Z10, OHSAS 18001, The American Chemistry Council's Responsible Care, and ILO-OSH 2001. All of these standards provide strategic guidance and focus on how to incorporate a plan-do-check-act cycle into the identification, management and evaluation of worksite risks. This paper details an exploratory study into whether practices associated with executing a risk-based management framework are visible through the actions of an organization's site-level management of health and safety risks. The results of this study show ways that site-level leaders manage day-to-day risk at their operations that can be characterized according to practices associated with a risk-based management framework. Having tangible operational examples of day-to-day risk management can serve as a starting point for evaluating field-level risk assessment efforts and their alignment to overall company efforts at effective risk mitigation through a HSMS or other processes.

Judicial Limitation of the EPA's Oversight Authority in Clean Water Act Permitting of Mountaintop Mining Valley Fills

Mountaintop removal mining operations in the Appalachian region have expanded significantly in recent decades. The practice decimates the mountain ecosystems by leveling forests, filling headwater streams, and producing significant runoff of heavy metals, sediment, and other pollutants that impair the aquatic environment of entire watersheds. Yet environmental permitting of the practice is relatively limited. A recent trend in litigation aimed at halting mining operations has involved challenging permits that authorize the discharge of mining overburden into headwater streams pursuant to the Clean Water Act (CWA). The Army Corps of Engineers has assumed jurisdiction over such discharges under section 404 of the CWA, asserting that overburden is “fill material.” Initial litigation on the matter challenged the Corps’ assumption of jurisdiction, asserting instead that overburden is a “pollutant,” the discharge of which is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under section 402 of the CWA. After the courts upheld the Corps’ interpretation that overburden is fill, the issue became the degree to which section 404 allows or requires the EPA to exercise environmental oversight of the Corps’ permitting process. The EPA has recently attempted to increase its oversight role by establishing procedures to review permit applications before the Corps issues the permits and by retroactively “vetoing” existing permits that it has found result in irreparable environmental damage. Those actions have been subjected to challenges by the mining industry, which have produced court rulings constraining the EPA’s oversight authority. In this Note, I argue that Congress did not intend for mining overburden to fall within the purview of the Corps’ section 404 jurisdiction, and that the cases affirming the Corps’ assumption of such jurisdiction were wrongly decided. Assuming, however, that those cases will not be overturned, I argue that the EPA must be afforded the ability to exercise the oversight authority inherent in section 404 to ensure that the Corps’ permits for mountaintop removal mining valley fills do not result in undue environmental damage. I assert that the recent decisions in National Mining Association v. Jackson and Mingo Logan Coal Co. v. EPA improperly read limits into the EPA’s oversight authority, and that the courts of appeals should overturn those decisions. Absent the EPA’s second layer of environmental review of section 404 permitting, the fragile Appalachian landscape may be permanently destroyed as a consequence of mountaintop removal mining.

From the Whitehorse Mining Initiative Towards Sustainable Mining: lessons learned

Much debate has taken place within the mineral policy community about whether or not meaningful progress has been made towards more sustainable practices. This paper investigates the changing approaches towards sustainable development undertaken by the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) over a period of approximately 20 years. The analysis begins in the early 1990s when MAC initiated the Whitehorse Mining Initiative (WMI) and concludes in 2010 when the association was operating under a strategy entitled Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM). The goal is to consider the nature of the learning that has taken place towards sustainability within the mineral industry using the case of a leading national mining association. The investigation was undertaken through a literature review as well as key informant interviews with stakeholders affected by the Canadian Mining Industry. Findings suggest that MAC’s approach to sustainable development has shifted from an ambitious and holistic partnership involving a range of stakeholders to a focused, member-specific agenda that addresses a few performance issues. The transition to TSM was based on lessons learned through working with the WMI and subsequent efforts. It reflects broader corporate tendencies to address social and ecological issues through corporate social responsibility initiatives. The implications of these trends suggest that voluntary initiatives in and of themselves should not be expected to replace the comprehensive regulatory responsibilities historically provided by government.

Improving mine safety technology and training in the U.S. recommendations of the Mine Safety Technology and Training Commission

The key issues studied focused on underground coal mining and included (1) prevention of explosions in sealed areas, (2) better emergency preparedness and response, (3) improvement of miners’ ability to escape, (4) better protection of miners before and after a fire or explosion, (5) improved provision of oxygen, and (6) development and implementation of more robust post-incident communication. The U.S. Congress passed the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006, which mandated new laws to address the issues. Concurrent with investigations and congressional deliberations, the National Mining Association formed the independent Mine Safety Technology and Training Commission to study the state-of-the-art relative to technology and training that could address the vulnerabilities exposed by the mine disasters. As discussed, the report outlined persistent vulnerabilities linked with significant hazards in underground coal mines, and made recommendations to provide a path for addressing them. Overall the commission report made 75 recommendations in the areas of risk-based design and management, communications technology, emergency response and mine rescue procedures, training for preparedness, and escape and protection strategies. In its deliberations, the commission importantly noted that mine safety in the U.S. needs to follow a new paradigm for ensuring mine safety and developing a culture of prevention that supports safe production at the business core. In the commission’s viewpoint, the bottom line in protecting coal miners is not only adopting a culture of prevention but also systematically pursuing mitigation of significant risks.

A SHORT ERA ENDS

WHEN HE STEPS DOWN as chief executive officer of the American Chemistry Council later this year, Jack N. Gerard will leave a trade association that has more money and many more members than when he joined but that is stumbling in its bid to boost its reputation with the public. The announcement that Gerard will leave after a little more than three years on the job was the surprise news at ACC’s annual meeting, held a week and a half ago in Palm Desert, Calif. He will depart in September to take over the helm of the American Petroleum Institute (C&EN, June 9, page 12). The former head of the National Mining Association, Gerard joined ACC at a difficult time for group, the U.S. chemical industry’s main trade association. It was reeling from the forced resignation of its previous leader and the loss of several major chemical companies from its ranks. Gerard quickly cut back ...

Carbon Capture & Storage: Blue-Sky Technology or Just Blowing Smoke?

Towering 650 feet over the sea surface and spouting an impressive burning flare, it would be easy to mistake the Sleipner West gas platform for an environmental nightmare. Its eight-story upper deck houses 200 workers and supports drilling equipment weighing 40,000 tons. Located off the Norwegian coast, it ranks among Europe’s largest natural gas producers, delivering more than 12 billion cubic feet of the fuel annually to onshore terminals by pipeline. Roughly 9% of the natural gas extracted here is carbon dioxide (CO2), the main culprit behind global warming. But far from a nightmare, Sleipner West is actually a bellwether for environmental innovation. Since 1996, the plant’s operators have stripped CO2 out of the gas on-site and buried it 3,000 feet below the sea floor, where they anticipate it will remain for at least 10,000 years. We believe [CCS] is a viable way to cut global warming pollution. . . . We have the knowledge we need to start moving forward. –David Hawkins, Natural Resources Defense Council Operated by StatoilHydro, Norway’s largest company, Sleipner is among the few commercial-scale facilities in the world today that capture and bury CO2 underground. Many experts believe this practice, dubbed carbon capture and storage (sometimes known as carbon capture and sequestration, but in either case abbreviated CCS), could be crucial for keeping industrial CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere. Sleipner injects 1 million tons of CO2 annually into the Utsira Formation, a saline aquifer big enough to store 600 years’ worth of emissions from all European power plants, company representatives say. With mounting evidence of climate change—and predictions that fossil fuels could supply 80% of global energy needs indefinitely—the spotlight on CCS is shining as brightly as the Sleipner flare. A panel of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently concluded that CCS is “the critical enabling technology to reduce CO2 emissions significantly while allowing fossil fuels to meet growing energy needs.” The panel’s views were presented in The Future of Coal, a report issued by MIT on 14 March 2007. Environmental groups are split on the issue. Speaking for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), David Hawkins, director of the council’s Climate Center and a member of the MIT panel’s external advisory committee, says, “We believe [CCS] is a viable way to cut global warming pollution. . . . We have the knowledge we need to start moving forward.” Other environmental groups, including the World Resources Institute, Environmental Defense, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, have also come out in support of CCS. These groups view CCS as one among many alternatives (including renewable energy) for reducing CO2 emissions. Greenpeace is perhaps the most vocal critic of CCS. Truls Gulowsen, Greenpeace’s Nordic climate campaigner, stresses that CCS deflects attention from renewable energy and efficiency improvements, which, he says, offer the best solutions to the problem of global warming. “Companies are doing a lot of talking about CCS, but they’re doing little to actually put it into place,” he says. “So, they’re talking about a possible solution that they don’t really want to implement now, and at the same time, they’re trying to push for more coal, oil, and gas development instead of renewables, which we already know can deliver climate benefits.”

JACK GERARD SHAKES UP ACC

WHEN JACK N. GERARD took the reins as president and chief executive officer of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) in July 2005, he found that the chemical industry's largest trade association was having a difficult time advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill. A little over a year later, Gerard is being praised by industry leaders and outside observers alike for moving swiftly to coordinate the group's message on natural gas and security issues and for strengthening the organization's role in advocating public policy. He has pledged to make ACC the gold standard of trade associations. For an organization representing a $550 billion industry, we were punching below our weight, says Gerard, who was hired away from the National Mining Association (NMA) to reinvigorate ACC, which had been struggling from internal disputes following the absorption of the American Plastics Council (APC) in 2002. Gerard replaced Thomas E. Reilly Jr., the former chairman of Reilly Industries, who ...

English

The Acid Drainage Technology Initiative (ADTI) was initiated in 1995 by federal agencies, the National Mining Association and the Interstate Mining Compact Commission to identify, evaluate and develop cost-effective and practical acid drainage technologies. In 1999, ADTI was expanded through the addition of the metal mining sector, which is focused on drainage quality issues related to metal mines. ADTI addresses drainage quality issues from abandoned, active, and future coal and metal mines. The guiding principle of ADTI is to build consensus among industry, federal and state regulatory agencies on acid drainage technology development and technology transfer issues. ADTI is focusing its efforts on mine drainage prediction, sampling/monitoring, modeling and avoidance/remediation. ADTI is not a regulatory or policy development program. ADTI includes the Coal Mining Sector and the Metal Mining Sector under the overall guidance of the ADTI Operations Committee. The Operations Committee consists of representatives from industry, state and federal government and academia. The Coal Mining Sector recently formed a number of groups to address a wide range of topics. The following groups have been formed: Water Quality, Coal Combustion By-Products (CCBs), Underground Mining, Passive Treatment, Technology Transfer. White papers have been prepared on 18 topics that are currently being studied. The Metal Mining Sector includes a steering committee and work groups on prediction, sampling and monitoring, modeling, mitigation, and pit lakes. The Metal Mining Sector has a committee that works with the Questa mine of Molycorp in the review of the waste rock pile study. Since 2003 ADTI is the US organizational partner of The International Network for Acid Prevention (INAP). The partnership is continuing and is strengthened through closer cooperation and communication. This paper will provide details of progress over the last four years.

Coal Poised for a Comeback?

Coal could be called energy’s comeback kid: sometimes forgotten, perhaps underappreciated, but always available for one more shot at the big time. It is one of humankind’s original sources of energy, and is used worldwide for cooking, heating, forging steel, and making electricity. In the United States, coal’s role today is limited almost exclusively to electricity generation; for the last decade or so, even that use has stagnated. For years new power facilities that relied on coal were spurned in favor of natural gas, as American electric companies were wooed by the cleaner-burning fossil fuel and its easier-to-site and cheaper-to-build power plants. Still, because so many coal-fired plants were built before the natural gas craze, coal accounts for over 50% of our annual electric generation. And now many energy experts say coal is poised to once again play a prominent role in the United States. Coal does have an appeal. For one thing, there’s plenty of it. It’s located here in the United States, a comfort to those worried about the political and security hazards of overdependence on imported energy. It’s cheap. And its price is stable, at least compared to natural gas. But coal can be ugly, too. If left unchecked with inadequate emissions control, it can emit ash (which has been linked to human cancers and genotoxic effects in some animal studies), sulfur dioxide (which contributes to acid rain), carbon dioxide (CO2; the chief culprit behind global warming), nitrogen oxides (NOx; which can produce smog and low-lying ozone), and mercury (linked to disorders in the kidneys and the nervous, digestive, and respiratory systems). Mining coal can also be a messy business, carving scars into the Earth, releasing clouds of dust, leaving behind sources of acidic water that can persist decades after a mine closes, and requiring dams—“impoundments” in industry lingo—that sometimes break and ravage miles of waterways. In coming years, however, what’s right about coal will almost certainly overpower what’s wrong, says Richard Gendreau, a senior market consultant for R.W. Beck, a Framingham, Massachusetts, management consulting and engineering company. And what’s wrong, he says, will be made better by new technologies and more vigorous application of existing technologies. “The ultimate driver on all of this,” he says, “is that ninety-five percent of our fossil energy reserves—the amount of fossil energy that we have within our boundaries that we can rely on for energy and economic security, as well as national security—is coal.”

English

In 1995, the U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM) and the National Mine Land Reclamation Center (NMLRC) joined with the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, the National Mining Association, academia, and other Federal agencies to form the Acid Drainage Technology Initiative (ADTI). The ADTI partnership seeks to identify, evaluate and develop best science based practices to prevent new acid mine drainage sources and eliminate existing sources. The ADTI partnership developed a management structure to oversee the program and developed action plans to address key technical areas. The ADTI organization consists of a coal mining sector, a metal mining sector and a secretariat, overseen by an Operations Committee. The coal mining sector of ADTI is divided into a prediction working group and an avoidance and remediation working group to implement and coordinate the research strategy. This paper summarizes the results of the coal mining sector efforts since the completion of the avoidance and remediation, and prediction handbooks in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the status of current activities. The activities have included field verification of acid drainage predictions using acid-base accounting, monitoring and follow up evaluation of acid mine drainage passive and in-situ treatment systems, developing standardized kinetic testing protocols, flooded underground mine pools, and issues related to elevated selenium in streams associated with surface mines.

Acid Drainage Technology Initiative: Continuing Progress in Coal Related Topics

In 1995, the U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM) and the National Mine Land Reclamation Center (NMLRC) joined with the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, the National Mining Association, academia, and other Federal agencies to form the Acid Drainage Technology Initiative (ADTI). The ADTI partnership seeks to identify, evaluate and develop "best science" based practices to prevent new acid mine drainage sources and eliminate existing sources. The ADTI partnership developed a management structure to oversee the program and developed action plans to address key technical areas. The ADTI organization consists of a coal mining sector, a metal mining sector and a secretariat, overseen by an Operations Committee. The coal mining sector of ADTI is divided into a prediction working group and an avoidance and remediation working group to implement and coordinate the research strategy. This paper summarizes the results of the coal mining sector efforts since the completion of the avoidance and remediation, and prediction handbooks in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the status of current activities. The activities have included field verification of acid drainage predictions using acid-base accounting, monitoring and follow up evaluation of acid mine drainage passive and in-situ treatment systems, developing standardized kinetic testing protocols, flooded underground mine pools, and issues related to elevated selenium in streams associated with surface mines.

National Mining Association v. Army Corps of Engineers

National Mining Association v. Army Corps of Engineers

Tagging explosives: Safety and cost dominate debate

National Research Council committee organized to evaluate the value of tagging explosives as a counterterrorism measure held its first public hearing last week in Washington, D.C. panel heard from industrial and special interest groups, companies with commercial or potential tagging technologies, and law enforcement agents. breadth of interest in the hearings underscores the complexity of the committee's task. The issues are complicated at many levels, said committee chairwoman Marye Anne Fox, vice president for research and chemistry professor at the University of Texas, Austin. We have to deal with safety, compatibility, detectability, costs, and benefits. Representatives from the National Mining Association, the Institute of Makers of Explosives, the Sporting Arms & Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, the National Rifle Association, the American Pyrotechnics Association, and the International Society of Explosives Engineers voiced a universal position: Adding foreign materials to explo...

95/05681 The new National Mining Association, bigger, stronger, more effective

Emotional Intelligence is widely accepted as one of the dominant factors contributing to superior educational and professional performance. Previous research has determined the contribution of Emotional Intelligence and some factors that influence Emotional Intelligence. Researchers have introduced measurement tools for Emotional Intelligence. Those that have been accepted internationally; Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MSCEIT) of Mayer, Caruso, and Salovey (2000); Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) of Bar-on (2002); and Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI-360) of Goleman, Boyatzis and HayGroup (1999). These models are generally accepted but constructed for Western empirical setting and written in the English language.Moon (2011) suggest that EI cannot be fully or meaningfully understood without consideration of people's cultural values and beliefs due to the existence of cross-cultural differences in EI. Instead of adopting a standard for Emotional Intelligence according to a western approach, it is important to develop an innovative Emotional Intelligence measurement tool according to the context of Indonesia because Indonesia is a multi-cultural country in South East Asia with too strong different characteristic when compared with Western nations. Wang (2009) argues that Eastern and Western cultures have numerous differences because Eastern and Western people live in different environment and are educated in distinctively different way. As a result, the characteristics of each culture are shown in its people behaviour, their attitude toward life and love, and their personalities (Wang, 2009).This research is done by innovatively analyse the current research on Emotional Intelligence in Indonesia and further research recommendation on innovative Emotional Intelligence measurement for Indonesia context. The purpose of this paper is to learn about and to compile some research on Emotional Intelligence specific to Indonesia's context and its impact on determining success. The various research components such as literature review, exploratory research and descriptive research have been implemented. Self Assessment Questionnaires were designed for Indonesian Business School graduates (undergraduates and master program), leaders of multi-sectors companies, and government employees. At the end, structured equation modelling was utilized to create a path model.The findings indicate that in Indonesia, Emotional Intelligence and Competencies have an important role in determining success and influencing performance. At last, the findings will be a powerful insight to develop innovative Emotional Intelligence measurement tools in Indonesian version.