Snowden Mining Industry Consultants and China ENFI Engineering Corp (ENFI) have signed a co-operation agreement between the two companies. This arrangement is a milestone for both parties – an international western based mining consultancy and a highly respected and international Chinese design institute establishing the strategic partnership. The companies’ joint objective in this partnership is to provide mining companies with the best that both Western and Chinese consulting companies can offer. This news item also looks modelling to make a coking coal project in Russia more efficient.
ENFI is one of China’s premier design institutes and has large geological, mining engineering and metallurgical teams as well as significant plant design, procurement and construction capabilities. It has achieved significant success working in many African, Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries and owns a number of global patents over processing technologies.
Snowden provides clients with services ranging from mineral resource and reserve definition through to feasibility studies, mine optimisation, corporate advisory services, reconciliation, resource governance and a wide range of technical consulting and software solutions.
Snowden and ENFI will collaborate to provide geological, mining engineering & metallurgical capability as well as providing plant design, processing technology and procurement. One specific initiative is to offer a new service where Snowden’s resource estimation and mine optimisation skills are combined with ENFI’s cost effective design, processing technologies and ability to source Chinese built plants. As a result, the partners say, “we can make projects with feasibility studies cost effective and revenue positive a reality.”
To the north, developing a suitable life of mine (LOM) coal geological model was essential for the long-term mine planning of one of Snowden Mining Consultant’s Russian coking coal clients. In order to achieve this task in a geological setting with regional scale reverse faults, a Vulcan Horizon Adaptive Rectangular Prism (HARP) model was created using three distinct coal block domains that were bounded by enclosed triangulations. The regional faults were identified by reviewing the geophysical borehole logs, and showed significant offsets within the geological borehole data.
The borehole fault intersections in each borehole were loaded as points (distinct faults) or line data (fault zones) in Vulcan and an iterative process of sectioning and fault triangulation surfaces refined the geological model coal blocks.
The geostatistical analysis of both the coal structure and coal quality data was completed in Snowden’s Supervisor V8 using Vulcan map files, that included a comparison of the all the data contained within each of the fault blocks and boreholes within each of the fault blocks. No significant difference existed in the comparison of the geostatistical data for each coal seam when the coal seam parameters for the entire seam dataset underwent comparison to the boreholes that were contained within each of the fault block domains. The continuity analysis findings supported the regional faulting geological observation, that the regional faulting ocurred post deposition of the coal seams.
The coal structure and quality geological modelling used the results of Supervisor statistical analysis, to define the interpolator distances. Once the Vulcan HARP geological model had been refined, points of observation were selected and the coal resources were estimated for the entire deposit. The geological model and resource report was then generated, and a number of geological model outputs were created for use in the mine planning software.
In conclusion, at the time the HARP model was generated there was no suitable information available in order to model the localised faults that had been intersected in the roadways of several of the developed longwall panels. The localised fault geological data was obtained by the client and returned to Snowden for geological modelling. The localised faults and area to be mined are contained within a single fault block; where a throw faulted grid model was created for this particular fault block, as shown in the figure.