A techno-economic model for optimum regeneration of surface mined land

The recent global scenario in the mineral sector may be characterized by rising competitiveness, increasing production costs and a slump in market price. This has pushed the mineral sector in general and that in the developing countries in particular to a situation where the industry has a limited capacity to sustain unproductive costs. This, more often than not, results in a situation where the industry fails to ensure environmental safeguards during and after mineral extraction. The situation is conspicuous in the Indian coal mining industry where more than 73% production comes from surface operations. India has an ambitious power augmentation projection for the coming 10 years. A phenomenal increase in coal production is proposed from the power grade coalfields in India. One of the most likely fall-outs of land degradation due to mining in these areas would be significant reduction of agricultural and other important land-uses. Currently, backfilling costs are perceived as prohibitive and abandonment of land is the easy way out. This study attempts to provide mine planners with a mathematical model that distributes generated overburden at defined disposal options while ensuring maximization of backfilled land area at minimum direct and economic costs. Optimization has been accomplished by linear programming (LP) for optimum distribution of each year’s generated overburden. Previous year’s disposal quantity outputs are processed as one set of the inputs to the LP model for generation of current year’s disposal output. From various geo-mining inputs, site constants of the LP constraints are calculated. Arrived value of economic vectors, which guide the programming statement, decides the optimal overburden distribution in defined options. The case example (with model test run) indicates that overburden distribution is significantly sensitive to coal seam gradient. The model has universal applicability to cyclic system (shovel–dumper combination) of opencast mining of stratified deposits.