Table of Contents

Mining’s Contribution to Civilization

Mining Terminology
Advancements in Mining Technology
Learning objectives
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
Explain how mining has contributed to civilization
List the mining terminologies
Explain the modern advancements in mining
Learning resources
Laptop
Notebook
Internet
Best library USA
Faculty-created Online Learning Activities
Module
Learning Activities
Complete the module
Present any given assignments in the required formats.
Introduction
Mining’s Contribution to Civilization
Mining may well have been the second of humankind’s earliest endeavors granted that
agriculture was the first. The two industries ranked together as the primary or basic industries of
early civilization. Little has changed in the importance of these industries since the beginning of
civilization. If we consider fishing and lumbering as part of agriculture and oil and gas
production as part of mining, then agriculture and mining continue to supply all the basic
resources used by modern civilization.
From prehistoric times to the present, mining has played an important part in human existence
Here the term mining is used in its broadest context as encompassing the extraction of any
naturally occurring mineral substances—solid, liquid, and gas—from the earth or other heavenly
bodies for utilitarian purposes.

The history of mining is fascinating. It parallels the history of civilization, with many important
cultural eras associated with and identified by various minerals or their derivatives: the Stone
Age (prior to 4000 B.C.E.),the Bronze Age (4000 to 5000 B.C.E.),the Iron Age (1500 B.C.E. to
1780 C.E.),the Steel Age (1780 to 1945),and the Nuclear Age (1945 to the present). Many
milestones in human history—Marco Polo’s journey to China,Vasco da Gama’s voyages to
Africa and India,Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and the modern gold rushes that led
to the settlement of California,Alaska, South Africa, Australia,and the Canadian Klondike—were
achieved with minerals providing a major incentive. Other interesting aspects of mining and
metallurgical history can be found by referring to the historical record
provided by Gregory (1980),Raymond (1984),and Lacy and Lacy (1992).

The abundance of minerals also provides a method of creating wealth. Minerals can be marketed
on the open market,enabling the countries that possess them to obtain valuable currency from
countries that do not. This generally results in the minerals-rich countries being the great
civilizations of the world while the ‘have-not’ countries generally suffer from a lower standard of
living. The ability to use mineral resources as a means of creating wealth opens the possibility
that a given country or countries will attempt to control the entire market in a particular
mineral,that is, to create an economic cartel in that mineral. In 1973, the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) attempted to control oil prices in a bold
maneuver to obtain windfall profits from the oil they produced. Although successful in the short
run,the cartel eventually lost effectiveness because of increased oil production elsewhere and
difficulty in controlling their own member countries. For a few years,OPEC was successful at
regulating petroleum prices in an awesome display of the value of possessing and producing
some of the world’s most valuable minerals. Other cartels have likewise been attempted.
However,the greater freedom in international trade now makes such an attempt less likely to
succeed.
Economic Development as a Result of Mining
The quest for minerals has without doubt brought wealth and civilization and accelerated
development to many parts of the world. Mature industries need resources for sustainability, and,
once they have been depleted in one location, more must be found (usually elsewhere). Although
one may question the motives and methods of those involved in early mining operations, their
tenacity and determination should never a pioneer miner had given way to the dull but enduring
glow of reality; progress followed quickly in the footsteps of these first buccaneers.
Modern Trends in Mining
Although current trends in mining have been covered in considerable detail in a subsequent
chapter, several aspects of this topic deserve further examination here.
Ore-Body Characteristics
The industry has already accepted the fact that the majority of the world’s future minerals will
come from low-grade, super-large, high-tonnage, and ultra-mechanized operation. This trend
already started with the move toward high-tonnage longwall operations for coal, huge open pits
for copper (and sometimes gold), and the mining of ore that 50 years ago would be considered
interesting but uneconomical to extract and therefore virtually unexploitable. Smaller operations
will still have a place, but the trend toward massive block caving operations, high tonnage, and
automated mining will only increase in tempo.
Indeed, with the quickly disappearing likelihood of discovering a new and easily mined high-
grade ore body, the time may soon come to view in-situ leaching of certain low-grade and high-
tonnage mineral deposits as attractive. Although host materials must be relatively permeable and
the mineral readily extractable by acid or alkaline leaching for this method of extraction to be
practical, nevertheless it may be attractive to mine some mineral deposits of low grade and
relatively large tonnage by this method, where traditional methods would prove uneconomical.
Although it is evident that not every mineral can be extracted in this way, in many instances such
deposits will respond to economic in-situ leaching.
Social and Environmental Factors
Unfortunately, it may appear to some that gone forever is the notion that mining is an honorable
adventure, often played out in inhospitable and distant regions, that aims to produce the very
building blocks upon which world civilization advances itself. Today, mining is often portrayed
as a beast that destroys everything in its path and creates wealth for the few and ongoing misery
for the many. This portrayal is unfair, although mining companies often do little to refute it and
then reinforce it through their opposition to environmental regulation.
Critics accuse the mining industry of having ignored environmental and social issues. Such
criticism ignores the fact that technologies for addressing environmental problems such as acid
drainage did not exist a generation ago. Moreover, factories, chemical and food processing
plants, and thermal power plants, which are generally closer to population centers than are
mines, sometimes produce more pollution than do mines. Nevertheless, we no longer live in an
age where mining can take place in splendid isolation. Mining engineers should take heart from
the fact that engagement rather than confrontation is the watchword when it comes to the future.
Although it may be too much to expect the world at large to respect mining engineering as a
profession, its citizens may in time acknowledge the essential role that mining performs and the
constraints under which it operates.
While the majority of the industry already believes that mining must develop and operate in
harmony with the environment, the real challenge is to convince the social structure, government
agencies, and nongovernmental organizations that mining can (and will) be done in a safe and
environmentally compatible manner. Mining’s acceptance of its responsibility relating to
environmental and social issues is now engrained into virtually every aspect of the industry, in
much the same way as safety has become. This reeducation has paid dividends in terms of
reversing the image of the mining industry, which had acquired the significant negative press
irrespective of what it did. A great deal of credit needs to go to those executives of senior mining
companies who grouped together several years ago to foster the Global Mining Initiative. This
was certainly an idea whose time had come, but to have grasped the nettle and financed its
launch and (more importantly) its implementation took a great deal of foresight and courage at a
time when it seemed that nothing the industry tried could stem the tidal wave of negative
opinion.
The majority of mining companies have made massive advances to address both environmental
and social issues. Nevertheless, the extraction of natural resources now attracts the sort of
responsibility and scrutiny that few other global industries are subjected to. The mining industry
has evolved (and continues to evolve), although it is perhaps too much to expect those outside
the industry to wholeheartedly acknowledge what the industry does in difficult circumstances.
Still, outside the realm of the legal/governmental license to operate, mining has nevertheless
accepted the general obligation of a social license to operate with the community at large in the
areas in which it operates. Such informal contracts are being increasingly accepted as a must-
have commodity whose goodwill value cannot be underestimated.
Tar Sands
The world seems to have a love–hate relationship with oil: It loves the freedom that petroleum
provides (i.e., instant power in a barrel) but dislikes the environmental issues associated with its
extraction, refining, and burning. Tar sands, which are mixtures of sand and bitumen, are found
in about 70 countries. They are distinct from oil shales, which are sedimentary rocks containing
kerogen and kerabitumen, a mixture of organic compounds (from which the extraction and
conversion of oil is much more expensive than tar sands).
Some tar sand deposits are accessed by drilling, after which superheated steam is used to melt
and migrate the tar to a collecting chamber from where it is pumped to the surface. However,
most of the economically viable tar sand deposits are accessed from the surface and mined
conventionally. By far the largest surface tar sand deposits are found in Alberta and
Saskatchewan in western Canada and contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil. Of the
Canadian oil contained in tar sand, approximately 173 billion barrels are considered
economically extractable using current surface or subsurface technology, with 20% of this
volume being recoverable by surface mining.
Although the cost of extracting oil from surface tar sands is high, the process does not contain
any of the high risks associated with traditional oil drilling (i.e., dry holes, blowouts, hydrogen
sulfide [or sour gas], explosions, and high equipment rental costs). The technology and
equipment originally employed to mine these surface tar sands were borrowed from the brown
coal surface mines of Germany. However, bucketwheel excavators have by and large given way
to traditional truck-and-shovel operations.
One of the major issues associated with tar sand extraction is that the oil content tends to be low
(of the order of 10% to 12% by volume) and that one of the by-products of tar sand production is
usually vast quantities of coarse sand. Indeed, the world’s largest dam is a tailings dam
associated with tar sand production in Alberta, Canada. In addition, the rock formations
surrounding the tar sands tend to be heavily water bearing and require depressurization. Water-
saturated organic deposits of peat material, known as muskeg, are also present in bogs and poorly
draining creek systems. Thus water management, which also includes treatment and storage,
pose significant mining engineering challenges, although the biggest issue is the operational
carbon footprint, which is much bigger than traditional petroleum exploration and production.
Of course, the subsurface exploitation of tar sands is also of interest to the mining industry,
although the technology employed is more akin to the methods of directional drilling and
hydrofracturing, which are the mainstay of today’s petroleum exploration and production
industry. Solution mining is an established extraction technique and is as applicable to the
subsurface extraction of tar as it is for sulfur or uranium.
Automation
Advances in automation and robotics, nevertheless, have the potential to significantly change the
way mining is conducted in many current and future operations. The major advantages of, and
drivers for, automation are in hazardous, repetitive, and/or labor-intensive tasks. Although
automation has not yet significantly impacted global mining and processing, it has, however,
started to show its value in terms of improved safety to the point that the industry has a real sense
that it will be a significant factor in the future.
Automation is particularly suitable for a number of key operations: production drilling, the real-
time recognition of material being drilled, automated loading, accurate and automatic movement
of equipment (be it drill rigs, loading shovels, or haul trucks), monitoring of moving parts for
maintenance purposes, and diagnostic intervention. The emerging view is that automation can
(and will) lead to immediate improvements in productivity. Dragline operations are in the
vanguard for research aimed at remote and fully automated working. By limiting operational
variations, a consistent input will ensure maximization of shovel loads, for example. In addition,
improved precision means that mining tasks are consistently performed at their required location,
exact rate, planned orientation, and precise time. Finally, because automation enables production
consistency (especially in consistent and regular ore bodies), it means that the mine design does
not need to be updated on an ongoing basis because of production variations.
With the advances being made in certain aspects of technology (e.g., wall profile recognition),
the time has come when repetitive tasks, such as multiple vehicle haulings from large
underground operations, are a reality and are being run from a control cabin at the surface. This
facility not only removes an operator from underground but means that an 8-hour shift means 8
hours at the controls. In addition, operator fatigue is negligible. However, it is not all positive
news.
Side-impact incidents, which are a significant issue for loadhaul- dump traveling at speed in
narrow tunnels, have still not been eliminated, while productivity per hour is still lower than for
manned machines. Obviously, more work still needs to be done.
In the future, mining organizations, and especially the larger ones, will see themselves as being
resource and service providers. Whether this involves power, water, forestry goods, or the mass
recycling of metals and glass, they will view their business in a holistic way. What shareholders
will make of this arrangement has yet to be tested, but in recent years we have seen a shift away
from shareholder positions based purely on financial returns. For example, hedge funds that
invest in enterprises based on a particular ethical position (be it green, nonpolluting, good
neighbor, anti-apartheid, or nonmilitary) have been available for many years.
The next logical step for mining companies is to ensure that in addition to their core business of
finding, mining, and refining minerals, they also engage in other associated activities. A mining
company could, therefore, find itself farming large tracts of land that it had reclaimed after strip
mining had passed through the area, running offshore wind farms, or providing hydroelectric
power and agricultural irrigation services. The fact remains that today’s society cannot exist
without mines and the products of mining. It is no good simply saying that we will allow others
to run roughshod over environmental and social issues as long as these issues do not impact us.
Alternatively, by simply outlawing the consumption of metals and minerals, a resource-scarce
global environment would be created that would relegate large areas of the world and its peoples
to zero advancement, while ensuring that developed countries remained on the plus side of the
inequality equation.

MINING TERMINOLOGY
There are many terms and expressions unique to mining that characterize the field and identify
the user of such terms as a ‘‘mining person.’’ The student of mining is thus advised to become
familiar with all the terms used in mining, particularly those that are peculiar to either mines or
minerals. Most of the mining terminology is introduced in the sections of this book where they
are most applicable. Some general terms are best defined at the outset; these are outlined here.
The following three terms are closely related:
Mine: an excavation made in the earth to extract minerals
Mining: the activity,occupation,and industry concerned with the extraction of minerals
Mining engineering: the practice of applying engineering principles to the development,
planning, operation, closure, and reclamation of mines.
Some terms distinguish various types of mined minerals. Geologically, one can distinguish the
following mineral categories:
Ore: a mineral deposit that has sufficient utility and value to be mined at a profit.
Gangue: the valueless mineral particles within an ore deposit that must be discarded.
Waste: the material associated with an ore deposit that must be mined to get at the ore and must
then be discarded. Gangue is a particular type of waste.
A further subdivision of the types of minerals mined by humankind is also common. These terms
are often used in the industry to differentiate between the fuels,metals,and nonmetallic minerals.
The following are the most common terms used in this differentiation:
Metallic ores: those ores of the ferrous metals (iron, manganese, molybdenum, and tungsten),the
base metals (copper,lead,zinc, and tin),the precious metals (gold, silver, the platinum group
metals),and the radioactive minerals (uranium,thorium,and radium).
Nonmetallic minerals (also known as industrial minerals): the nonfuel mineral ores that are not
associated with the production of metals. These include phosphate, potash, halite, trona,sand,
gravel,limestone,sulfur, and many others.
Fossil fuels (also known as mineral fuels): the organic mineral substances that can be utilized as
fuels, such as coal, petroleum, natural gas, coalbed methane,gilsonite, and tar sands.
It should be noted that the mining engineer is associated with the extraction of nearly all these
mineral resources. However, the production of petroleum and natural gas has evolved into a
separate industry with a specialized technology of its own.

The essence of mining in extracting mineral wealth from the earth is to drive an excavation or
excavations from the surface to the mineral deposit. Normally, these openings into the earth are
meant to allow personnel to enter into the underground deposit. However,boreholes are at times
used to extract the mineral values from the earth. These fields of boreholes are also called mines,
as they are the means to mine a mineral deposit,even if no one enters into the geologic realm of
the deposit. Note that when the economic profitability of a mineral deposit has been established
with some confidence, ore or ore deposit is preferred as the descriptive term for the mineral
occurrence. However,coal and industrial mineral deposits are often not so designated,even if
their profitability has been firmly established. If the excavation used for mining is entirely open
or operated from the surface,it is termed a surface mine. If the excavation consists of openings
for human entry below the earth’s surface,it is called an underground mine. The details of the
procedure,layout, and equipment used in the mine distinguish the mining method. This is
determined by the geologic,physical, environmental,economic, and legal circumstances that
pertain to the ore deposit being mined.
Mining is never properly done in isolation,nor is it an entity in itself. It is preceded by geologic
investigations that locate the deposit and economic analyses that prove it financially feasible.
Following extraction of the fuel, industrial mineral,or metallic ore, the run-of-mine material is
generally cleaned or concentrated. This preparation or beneficiation of the mineral into a higher-
quality product is termed mineral processing. The mineral products so produced may then
undergo further concentration,refinement,or fabrication during conversion, smelting,or refining
to provide consumer products. The end step in converting a mineral material into a useful
product is marketing.

Quite frequently,excavation in the earth is employed for purposes other than mining. These
include civil and military works in which the object is to produce a stable opening of a desired
size,orientation, and permanence. Examples are vehicular,water, and sewer tunnels,plus
underground storage facilities,waste disposal areas, and military installations. Many of these
excavations are produced by means of standard mining technology. Professionally,the fields of
endeavor associated with the mineral industries are linked to the phase or stage in which an
activity occurs. Locating and exploring a mineral deposit fall in the general province of geology
and the earth sciences. Mining engineering,already defined, encompasses the proving (with the
geologist),planning, developing, and exploiting of a mineral deposit. The mining engineer may
also be involved with the closure and reclamation of the mine property,although he or she may
share those duties with those in the environmental fields. The fields of processing,refining, and
fabricating are assigned to metallurgy,although there is often some overlap in the mineral
processing area with mining engineering.

You are required to do a research on this course and submit it in essay form of 10-15 pages.
Note that this course must have
1. A Cover pages
1. Table of content of what you have developed
1. Introduction
1. Findings
1. Summary
1. References

Questions
1. The excavation of minerals of the years have evolved. Explain the current existing
mining trends.
2. Explain why humans need minerals and the purpose of those minerals.
3. Over time, the hysteria associated with global warming will have matured to the
universally accepted term climatic change. Discuss how this has had an impact on
mining.