This book is crafted against the backdrop of the commodities super-cycle that we had in the first decade of the 21st Century, and the mining industry having learnt severe lessons. Dr Ian Runge summarized the decade-long experiment with the prioritization of volumes and said, “The economics of mining is at an inflection point. For the last decade or so our focus has been on developing mines and bringing them into production. It is not production on its own that is important, it is how efficiently we can produce.”¹ The message was echoed by Ivan Glasberg, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Glencor at the time of penning this book: “The big guys really screwed up (during the super-cycle) by building too many mines”, and as a result he opined that miners needed to learn about supply and demand fundamentals. “The real trap in the gold industry in the past was chasing volume,” said Tom Palmer, Newmont CEO and, “No one made any real money,” according to Barrick Gold Corporation’s CEO, Mark Bristow. <...>

The distribution of ore grades within a deposit is of mixed character, being partly structured and partly random. On one hand, the mineralizing process has an overall structure and follows certain laws, either geological or metallogenic; in particular, zones of rich and poor grades always exist, and this is possible only if the variability of grades possesses a certain degree of continuity. Depending upon the type of ore deposit, this degree of continuity will be more or less marked, but it will always exist; mining engineers can indeed be thankful for this fact because, otherwise, no local estimation and, consequently, no selection would be possible. However, even though mineralization is never so chaotic as to preclude all forms of forecasting, it is never regular enough to allow the use of a deterministic forecasting technique . This is why a scientific (at least, simply realistic) estimation must necessarily take into account both features - structure and randomness inherent in any deposit. Since geologists stress the first of these two aspects, and statisticians stress the second, I proposed, over 15 years ago, the name geostatistics to designate the field which synthetizes these two features and opens the way to the solution of problems of evaluation of mining deposits <...>

In early August 2012, following failed wage negotiations and civil unrest, about three thousand striking platinum miners employed by Lonmin plc gathered on a hill close to the town of Marikana in the North West province of South Africa. Nine out of ten Lonmin miners were migrants, mainly from the Eastern Cape, who lived next to the mine in squalid shacks and informal settlements.1 During a confrontation on 16 August, police opened fre, wounding 78 miners and killing 34 others. Many of those killed and injured were shot in the back.

Mining operations may be classified into surface mining, where the operations are unconstrained and open to the sky, and underground operations, where mining takes place in tunnels and galleries. In both situations roads play a key role as a typical mining operation consists of moving overburden (waste material) and ore from where the material was formed or deposited, to waste dumps or beneficiation plants.