Significant improvement achieved in China’s utilization of mineral resources
Source: www.zgkyb.com Citation: www.agkyb.com Date: October 26, 2015
The Comprehensive Utilization of Mineral Resources Forum had been annually held for 5 years. It aimed to create communications for advanced mining technologies, facilitate information sharing, strengthen technological innovation and application and improve resource utilization. The Comprehensive Utilization of Mineral Resources Forum 2015 was pluralistic, at which guests had made speeches and different views and experiences had been shared and exchanged.
Basic Situation of Mineral Comprehensive Utilization in China
Mr. He Bingqing, Vice President of Chinese Academy of Land and Resources Economics introduced the comprehensive utilization and progress of mineral resources in China from utilization efficiency, development potential and policies.
Thanks to 10 years of development and progress, the utilization efficiency of mineral resources in China had improved significantly, especially in energy consumption for unit GDP according to statistics. On one side, it reflected the progress of China’s utilization efficiency of mineral resources and its great success of economic restructuring. On the other side, it showed that despite current increasing depth and difficulties of mining, the comprehensive mining recovery rate in China had steadily increased 4.8% and its land mining recovery rate remained over 96%. In addition, the utilization efficiency of tailing had also increased gradually.
It was said that the Chinese Academy of Land and Resources Economics has set a goal to improve the comprehensive utilization efficiency of national metal tailing to 20%and it was expected to be able to accomplish this goal.
In terms of development potential, China had great potential in the comprehensive utilization of mineral resources due to its rich reserves of low-grade mineral resources and mineral tailings. It can be seen that China has ushered in a new era of secondary resources recycling.
In terms of policies, comprehensive utilization of mineral resources had been listed as one of the top priorities in the Strategic Action Plan for 2011-2015 by Ministry of Land and Resources. Since the 18th CPC National Congress had put forward the ecological civilization construction, resource conservation and comprehensive utilization of resources had been highlighted in policies including Suggestions for Strengthening Ecological Civilization Construction and the Ecological Civilization Master Plan, to promote a fundamental change in resource utilization. In addition, comprehensive utilization of mineral resources had been included by each department in policies and programs including energy conservation and emission reduction, recycling economy and promotion programs. In recent years, the ministry has made a comprehensive selection and promotion of advanced technology, and summed up and promoted over 210 advanced technology. As of the end of last year, the ministry has amended and improved some important measures to promote the efficiency of comprehensive utilization of resources.
Thus, China’s focus on mining industry had shifted from mineral exploitation to resource conservation and intensive utilization.
Difficulties in Rational Evaluation on Mineral Reserves
With the iron ore price dropped 60% than early 2014, the net profit of four global mining giants including Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Vale, FMG in 2014 decreased over 85% according to their 2014 Earnings. Mr. Wang Huili, director of Technical Services Department of Deloitte commented that mining industry belongs to manufacturing sector whose PM2 hovered around 50 in recent 2- 3 years due to slowdown economy. It indicated that investors lacked of interest in mining industry. To some extent, it also indicated that it would be pragmatic to improve the comprehensive utilization of mineral resources.
According to Mr.Yu Haifeng, director of Dept of Mineral Resources Reserves of MLR, Ministry of Land and Resources had introduced comprehensive utilization project of mineral resources, initiated comprehensive utilization demonstration sites and made survey on mining recovery rate,ore dressing recovery rate and comprehensive utilization rate of 22 major mineral resources mining project. The minimum target for rational exploitation of 22 mines had been issued and 210 advanced technologies for mineral exploration and comprehensive utilization had been selected. All these effort had propelled China’s comprehensive utilization of mineral resources to a new era.“At present, the fourth selection of advanced technologies for comprehensive utilization of mineral resources has just been completed, which aims to promote and guide mining enterprises to adopt advanced technologies to improve the efficiency of mineral resources and to improve ecological civilization construction”, said Yu.
Currently, low technology transfer and penetration, poor access to information, small investment in R$D and small application scale as well as insufficient commitment of companies hindered the application and dissemination of advanced technologies. It also indicated that China is in urgent need to accelerate the promotion and application of advanced technologies,Yu noted.
Mr. Feng Ansheng, director of Zhengzhou Institute of mineral comprehensive utilization at CGS, said that China’s s coal resources exploitation are mainly based on underground mining. It held high energy consumption despite its high recovery rate beyond 80% which is far beyond many developed countries, due to its focus on low value-added products, such as L2,L3 and L4 products.
Though a great progress in utilization of associated minerals has been made, China still faced challenges including improving the utilization efficiency of waste rock and mineral tailings and the quality of gold mine.
Information technology was efficient for resources conservation and intensive utilization, but some mining companies in China encountered many problems in the application of the technology in recent years, including how to apply the technology to achieve financial integration, centralized procurement, and reduce procurement costs. Thus an integrated model was in need to help these companies to break development bottlenecks.
Mr. Wang Huili proposed that it is important for mining groups to clearly define duties of the whole group and each business department as most mining companies in China are big groups with various businesses covering mines exploitation, smelting, processing and mechanics. In the process of information technology application, some groups and its business departments weren’t clear about each others’ duties and responsibilities thus caused messes. So groups and other business departments should be clearly defined and separated with duties and roles.
Madam Ma Ailing, chief engineer of Beijing SD Science & Technology Development Co., Ltd. pointed out while some factors could be easily learned and managed in the mining process,, some factors couldn’t not, such as the evaluation of invisible and intangible mineral reserves. “It is difficult to make a evaluation on reserves and comprehensive utilization of mineral resources because it concerns both the amount and the division of resources reserves and it is very difficult to define the division.”, said Ma.
Mineral resources was the core of the whole mining chain, and a rational evaluation on mineral reserves was of vital importance to the exploitation and utilization of mineral resources. Only with a rational evaluation, was it possible to get aware of mineral resources comprehensively and objectively thus to carry out more effective macro-management regulation. It was in contradiction with exploration requirements that most mining companies expected to gain maximum return with minimal investment. To solve the problem, advanced techniques and methods should be adopted for scientific exploration and for comprehensive and reasonable mineral reserves evaluation.
“Reserves calculation and industrial index are inseparable but industrial index are based on market and mining companies.” said Ma Ailing, “It is in need to further verify the reasonableness of current industrial index. In additional, a comprehensive evaluation on associated minerals should also be taken account of in the reserves calculation, as associated minerals are scarce minerals and inadequate exploration may directly adversely affect the following comprehensive utilization of mineral resources.”
Solutions: Advanced Technologies
Yu Haifeng noted that widespread application of advanced technology is a fundamental way to realize rational and efficient exploitation and utilization of resources. It was also an importance measure to carry out innovation-driven development strategies thus to accelerate the transformation of mining industry. Thanks to mining workers and researchers, China had developed a batch of advanced technologies in the exploitation and comprehensive utilization of oil, gas, coal, metals and other important mineral resources in recent years and emerged a number of enterprises excel at advanced technology research and development. These achievements had contributed to the utilization and efficiency of mineral resources.
“The essence of revitalizing resources through technology mainly refers to the reuse of low-grade minerals and there are a number of demonstration sites and companies, such as the Zijin Mining Group ”said He Bingqing. He further explained that China is rich in various and rich mineral tailings and it has great potential to make comprehensive utilization of them. Recently, it had seen a growing momentum for comprehensive utilization of mineral tailings. There were two reasons: firstly, materials for recycling were expanded due to advanced technologies; secondly, growing land imposition cost urged companies to reduce tailings emission as tailings dams covers a large amount of land.
In additional, with the fast upgrading of products, the life cycle of a product had been shorten just to a decade, which provided great opportunity for secondary metal recycling. The scrap metal recycling would help to reduce the consumption of new mineral resources. And with the recycling of “urban mines”, China had ushered in a new era of resources recycling.
It is also the national strategy to develop advanced mining technologies, said He Fayu, deputy general manager of Science & Technology Management Dept of China Minmetals Corporation.“Ways for the separation of lead and zinc in China can be divided into selective flotation, bulk flotation and combined process and bulk flotation are generally adopted. The comprehensive utilization of lead and zinc tailings and safe disposal are similar to other most metal tailings in China. “He said, “The recent 30 years has witnessed the great progress of our lead-zinc separation technologies, mining recovery and resources comprehensive utilization. Though Chinese enterprises who begin develop overseas lead and zinc minerals are left with low-grade lead and zinc resources as global mining giants have taken up high-grade ones, our advanced lead and zinc mining technologies can fully support their overseas business.”
Most of China`s mineral resources were underground minerals. With the development of large-scale blasting mining technology, new advanced technologies had taken place of outdated technologies and great progress had been made in large-diameter hole and ground pressure monitoring. New technologies would focus on the combination of mining and separation.
At the same time, technical standards for comprehensive utilization of mineral resources had been improved and further strengthened mineral evaluation. The 22 regulations covering energy, non-ferrous metal, ferrous metal and nonmetallic ores issued by Ministry of Land and Resources marked the initial development of China’s major mineral resources system and laid technical basis for further supervision of national mineral resources.
Technical Indicators and Methods for comprehensive utilization of Mineral Resources issued by Ministry of Land and Resources in March,2015 provided technical manual and guidance for comprehensive evaluation on energy conservation and comprehensive utilization in China. Demonstration sites had also been established. In 2011, the Ministry had initiated the construction of 40 mineral resources sites of mineral resources comprehensive utilization. By the end of 2014, investment from central government had reached RMB15 billion and investment from enterprises reached nearly RMB1 trillion. Nowadays, the demonstration sites has achieved great breakthrough in comprehensive utilization technologies and developed a series new energy conservation models. As estimated by the Ministry of Land and Resources, these demonstration sites had achieved great breakthrough in 8 major technologies and developed 9 new energy exploration and industry development models, successfully advanced the upgrading and transformation of mining industry in China.
He Bingqing proposed that government should also take measures to accelerate and advance the mineral resources conservation and intensive utilization. Measures to promote advanced technology application, standard construction, supervision and management as well as other incentive measures should be taken to lead and encourage enterprises to participate in and play their roles in the market and to strengthen international cooperation, so as to improve our mineral resources conservation and intensive utilization to a new level. ( Liu Aiying)
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