ABSTRACT
In most mining engineering curriculums, there is a capstone course called ‘Senior Design.’ During their academic careers, the students have taken a number of courses on individual topics in mining engineering such as surface mining, rock mechanics, materials handling, drilling and blasting, mine finance, mineral economics, etc. In this capstone course the students will be drawing upon this background and complete a near pre-feasibility level evaluation of some mining property. Beginning with the location information, geology and drill hole data for a given prospect, the student calculates the resource base, estimates the costs and recoveries, selects a price, determines the reserves, selects a production rate and a corresponding equipment fleet, develops a mine plan, calculates the economic indicators and writes a comprehensive engineering report. Unfortunately, it is often difficult for the students to procure the necessary drill hole data for carrying out the project, and hence quite a lot of time is spent simply spinning wheels. In the way of a response, in this chapter, eight drill hole data sets have been included on the distribution disk:
1. The Arizona Copper property 2. The Minnesota Natural Iron property 3. The Utah Iron property 4. The Minnesota Taconite property 5. The Kennecott Barneys Canyon Gold property 6. The Newmont Gold property 7. The Codelco Andina Copper property 8. The Codelco Norte Copper property All of the data sets are of a size that can be run using the CSMine software. The Arizona
Copper property data have been used in the CSMine tutorial. In this section, some actual background information has been included for the different
properties as well as some complementing information taken from various other operations. In some cases, the data have been adjusted to facilitate analysis. No attempt has been made to provide complete information since the students are expected to be able to do some work on their own.
