Approach to operational mine planning: Case study Tamnava West

Abstract

In contemporary mining industry is very difficult to achieve production targets and profit without investing effort in detailed excavation planning. It is especially true for deposits with complex geological structure and production technology, as is the case for many coal mines in Serbia. The majority of coal production is used for generation of electricity in power plant. This fact is the main reason why production objectives of coal mine and power plant are strongly connected. Due to the fluctuation of the coal quality, operational mine planning (as a part of coal homogenization process), is of critical importance for managing successful coal quality control and meeting criteria of power plant. This paper investigates advantage of proper operational planning on coal quality control process and overall production performance. For better understanding case study is conducted on open pit Tamnava West field. Successful operational mine planning is almost impossible without use of modern software packages. For that reason in presented case study operational mine planning is done with Minex software.

Keywords

• operational planning
• geological modeling
• coal quality control
• mining block and cut