Final open pit design for Monte Raso phosphate mine.

Abstract

A fundamental aspect in the development of any open-pit mining project is the determination of the mineable reserves and the respective design of the ultimate pit limits. The design of the ultimate pit is of prime importance for practical open pit mining as is evident from the worldwide attention it has been receiving in the past decades. All major mining software offer some version of pit limits design packages among their services. The Monte Raso property (MR mine) is a phosphate prospect located in the central state of Goiás, in Brazil. The drillhole information and the topographic map have been kindly provided by a Brazilian phosphate mining company. As the true location of the prospect is not important in this case study authors have modified it to the vicinity of a real phosphate mine in order to provide a realistic geological information from published sources. In this fictitious account, the names of the structural features have been retained. In this paper, at first, the Vulcan software, applied over the data of MR phosphate deposit, will be introduced. The modeling of the ore deposit was done using a geological database of 41 diamond core samples. Finally, the ultimate pit limits of the deposit were determined and the design of the ultimate pit presented.