Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Mining has a strong influence on our nation's economy. In 2003, mining accounted for 12.6% of Canada's export earnings, contributed $41 billion to the economy, and directly employed 389,000 Canadians. With the growing demand for raw and processed materials, the discovery and development of world-class ore deposits has become a key nation sustainer. However, industry faces serious challenges: lack of HQP, limited discovery of economic deposits, costly and risky mining methods, and challenges related to deep mining. The proposed research is designed to impact the mineral resources recovery process, assist the mining industry in adapting to these challenges, to new regulations, and to increased international competition. Today, high metal prices place tremendous pressure on Canadian mines to increase extraction rates and transform deep reserves into economic mines. However, due to increased depths (>2500 m), these reserves are more difficult to extract within Canada's renowned safety standards. Sudden violent rock failures (rockbursts) are difficult to predict and pose a major hazard to deep mining. Despite inherent difficulties and complexities involved in forecasting rockbursts, the strategic importance for risk management is evident. This project aims to develop, test and demonstrate the validity of a new approach to numerically predict mine-wide brittle failure migration patterns caused by rock excavation. The research will utilize complex multi-dimensional geophysical and seismological data to validate an innovative geomechanical interpretation hypothesis called "mining domino effect". The new knowledge will be disseminated by training HQP and by supporting decision-making with new methodologies of data integration, modeling and information retrieval. The expected outcome of this research will result in novel mining strategies that will enable Canadians to develop more efficient and economical mining processes. It will also assist in better managing similar problems in other fields such as in siting nuclear waste repositories, understanding the behavior of CO2 sequestration reservoirs, fluid injection and oil and gas reservoir management.