Cost Estimation Handbook For The Australian Mining Industry

This text presents about 150 papers based on an international symposium on mine planning and equipment selection, held in Canada in 1995. Coverage includes: design and planning of surface and underground mines; surface mining and the environment; tailings disposal; and slope stability analysis.

This fully updated textbook is intended for the economic geologist who deals with the evaluation of deposits at an early stage of development. It offers rules for quick and easy calculations based on the application of approximate data. It provides both the student and the geologist in the field with a complete set of rules and methods enabling them to perform a quick initial evaluation of the deposit without the support of specialists or computers – even if he is left to his own resources. All rules for calculations are illustrated with examples, and mistakes and pitfalls the authors encountered during their careers are pointed out.

“Everything” sums up what must be considered for a properly documented property evaluation. Less than 30% of the projects that are developed in the minerals industry yield the return on investment that was projected from the project feasibility studies. The tools described in this handbook will greatly improve the probability of meeting your projections and minimizing project execution capital cost blowout that has become so prevalent in this industry in recent years. Mineral Property Evaluation provides guidelines to follow in performing mineral property feasibility and evaluation studies and due diligence, and in preparing proper documents for bankable presentations. It highlights the need for a consistent, systematic methodology in performing evaluation and feasibility work. The objective of a feasibility and evaluation study should be to assess the value of the undeveloped or developed mineral property and to convey these findings to the company that is considering applying technical and physical changes to bring the property into production of a mineral product. The analysis needs to determine the net present worth returned to the company for investing in these changes and to reach that decision point as early as possible and with the least amount of money spent on the evaluation study. All resources are not reserves, nor are all minerals an ore. The successful conclusion of any property evaluation depends on the development, work, and conclusions of the project team. The handbook has a diverse audience: • Professionals in the minerals industry that perform mineral property evaluations. • Companies that have mineral properties and perform mineral property feasibility studies and evaluations or are buying properties based on property evaluation. • Financial institutions, both domestic and overseas, that finance or raise capital for the minerals industry. • Consulting firms and architectural and engineering contractors that utilize mineral property feasibility studies and need standards to follow. • And probably the most important, the mining and geological engineering students and geology and economic geology students that need to learn the standards that they should follow throughout their careers.

A topic of utmost importance in civil engineering is finding optimal solutions throughout the life cycle of buildings and infrastructural objects, including their design, manufacturing, use, and maintenance. Operational research, management science, and optimization methods provide a consistent and applicable groundwork for engineering decision-making. These topics have received the interest of researchers and, after a rigorous peer-review process, eight papers have been published in this Special Issue. The articles in this Printed Edition demonstrate how solutions in civil engineering, which bring economic, social, and environmental benefits, are obtained through a variety of methodologies and tools. Usually, decision-makers need to take into account not just a single criterion, but several different criteria and, therefore, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches have been suggested for application in five of the published papers; the rest of the papers apply other research methods. Most approaches suggested decision models under uncertainty, proposing hybrid MCDM methods in combination with fuzzy or rough set theory, as well as D-numbers. The application areas of the proposed MCDM techniques mainly cover production/manufacturing engineering, logistics and transportation, and construction engineering and management. We hope that a summary of the Special Issue as provided here will encourage a detailed analysis of the papers included in the Printed Edition.