In January 2018, Kinross Gold Corp launched the ‘Innovation Opportunity Fund’ for employees to submit innovative ideas to improve the mining group’s global operations by sharing best practices and promoting continuous improvement. A recently-funded idea came from the Technical Services team at the Tasiast gold mine in Mauritania who developed a technology for a new blast movement modelling and optimisation project to improve ore movement tracking and reconciliation.

The idea was developed after the team identified a need to maximise efficiency and reduce costs when blasting. The technology uses an optimisation tool to create dig lines and compute estimated costs based on mining directions. As a result, the team can decipher where and how to dig in order to maximise cash flow.

“This technology is an opportunity to re-evaluate the way we blast by tracking ore movement based on mining direction,” said Benoit Poupeau, Geology Superintendent, Tasiast. “Together, our geologists, planners and miners work together using this technology to our advantage and maximise production while reducing costs – it has been a great team effort.”

The success of this technology has allowed Kinross mine operations and technical services teams to integrate this into their daily operations, resulting in improvements to material routing and reconciliation.