Alrosa awarded technical solutions!
Alrosa summed up the results of the competition for projects on the resumption of works at the Mir deposit
Alrosa, the world leader in diamond mining, summarized the results of the final stage of the competition for projects on the resumption of mining works at the Mir pipe deposit.
The competition committee awarded two projects with the second place. Another project took the third place. The technical solutions proposed will be used during the development of the mining works resumption concept.
10 out of 33 projects from the second stage came through to the final part of the competition.
Their authors presented their works at the meeting of the competition committee headed by Igor Sobolev, First Deputy CEO - Executive Director of Alrosa.
All projects were evaluated from the standpoint of their scientific and technical as well as technological validity, degree of readiness to be commissioned, compliance with the requirements of industrial safety for mining operations, feasibility at the existing modern level of development of industry and technology, economic efficiency, and the completeness of the proposed solution development.
“The basic concept of these technical solutions is to exclude the ingress of groundwater into existing mine workings of the Mir mine. It is possible to resume mining at the Mir mine only after the creation of a security pillar to prevent the ingress of brines from the Meteger-Ichersky Water-Bearing Complex (MIWBC) into the existing mine workings system.
This is due to the fact that a significant portion of workings has been performed with halogen-carbonate rocks,” says Andrey Cherepnov, Chief Engineer of Alrosa and deputy chairman of the competition committee.
“In the opinion of the committee, the proposed solutions are the most acceptable from the viewpoint of safety of mining operations resumption on the Mir pipe and are the least expensive. At the same time, none of the proposed solutions can be considered exhaustive, that is, solving the problem as a whole. As such, we did not award the first place.
Our next task is to bring together the most successful technical solutions in order to propose a single concept for the resumption of mining operations based thereon.”
