ALROSA, the global diamond mining group, recently summarised the results of the final stage of the competition for projects on the resumption of underground mining works at the Mir pipe deposit following the August 2017 accident that claimed eight lives. The competition committee awarded two projects with the second place. Another project took the third place. The technical solutions proposed will be used during the development of the mining works resumption concept.
10 out of 33 projects from the second stage came through to the final part of the competition. Their authors presented their works at the meeting of the competition committee headed by Igor Sobolev, First Deputy CEO – Executive Director of ALROSA. All projects were evaluated from the standpoint of their scientific and technical as well as technological validity, degree of readiness to be commissioned, compliance with the requirements of industrial safety for mining operations, feasibility at the existing modern level of development of industry and technology, economic efficiency, and the completeness of the proposed solution development.
Following the evaluation, none of the projects scored enough points to take the first place. However, the second place was taken by two projects at once: “Project for the resumption of mining at the Mir mine” (authors: А.А. Korovenkov and R.A. Zakharov, ALROSA employees) and “Ensuring safe working conditions for the pit reserves of the Mir mine under a water facility due to the reconstruction of the pit with its filling with a low-filtering rock mass in the interval of the water-bearing complex” (authors: A.N. Akishev and V.V. Lobanov, Yakutniproalmaz Institute). The third place was awarded to the project “Complex of measures to ensure safety and development of the technology for excavating the Mir mine after being flooded” (authors: K.V. Bulatov, Y.A. Dik, A.V. Kotenkov, Lothar te Kamp, Robert Sterrett, representing several organisations).
“The basic concept of these technical solutions is to exclude the ingress of groundwater into existing mine workings of the Mir mine. It is possible to resume mining at the Mir mine only after the creation of a security pillar to prevent the ingress of brines from the Meteger-Ichersky Water-Bearing Complex (MIWBC) into the existing mine workings system. This is due to the fact that a significant portion of workings has been performed with halogen-carbonate rocks,” says Andrey Cherepnov, Chief Engineer of ALROSA and deputy chairman of the competition committee. “In the opinion of the committee, the proposed solutions are the most acceptable from the viewpoint of safety of mining operations resumption on the Mir pipe and are the least expensive. At the same time, none of the proposed solutions can be considered exhaustive, that is, solving the problem as a whole. As such, we did not award the first place. Our next task is to bring together the most successful technical solutions in order to propose a single concept for the resumption of mining operations based thereon.”
According to Cherepnov, such concept will be presented at the All-Russian Conference “Experience and practical steps to restore the mining enterprise after an accident,” which will be held on April 25-26, 2018 in Moscow. The authors of competition projects, which have come through to the final part of the competition, will also be invited to participate.
ALROSA will pay 1 million rubles to each team whose project took the second place. The third place will be rewarded with 500 thousand rubles. According to the decision of the competition committee, the authors of the remaining seven projects that came through to the final round, will receive incentive awards in the amount of 100 thousand rubles.
The competition of projects for the resumption of mining operations at the Mir deposit was announced in early January of this year. Most applications for the competition came from Russian cities, including Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Yakutsk, one proposal came from South Africa. 33 applications have been selected to participate in the second round, their authors were provided with the access to expanded information for more detailed preparation of the projects.