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How Denmark is helping drive sustainability in Australian mining
The likes of FLSmidth, Aalborg CSP, DHI, Advent Technologies and C.C. Jensen are among the Danish companies helping the Australian resources sector move…
The likes of FLSmidth, Aalborg CSP, DHI, Advent Technologies and C.C. Jensen are among the Danish companies helping the Australian resources sector move into a more sustainable future. Australian Mining chats to each OEM to find out how.
Denmark has long been at the forefront of the global sustainability push – and with good reason.
“In the early 1970s, Denmark was 99 per cent dependent on fossil fuels,” Her Excellency Pernille Dahler Kardel, Denmark’s ambassador to Australia, told Australian Mining.
“When the oil crisis hit, Danish citizens had difficulty heating their homes and everyone was forced to abandon their cars on Sundays.
“This crisis galvanised the nation to move away from its reliance on fossil fuels and sparked what some might say is a national obsession with becoming green – long before it became fashionable.”
Denmark’s hunger to become green permeates across the country’s policy and practice, and the nation has become a world leader in wind energy and waste, while its bike culture is certainly no joke.
So how is Denmark, a country not known for its mining, assisting the Australian resources sector with its own sustainability objectives?
Kardel put it simply.
“While Denmark is not a mining nation, it is a nation that has long looked for solutions to reduce energy and water consumption,” she said.
“And many of those solutions can be applied across multiple industries, including the mining industry.”
FLSmidth
Danish original equipment manufacturer (OEM) FLSmidth has been supporting the sector for decades and has become a market leader for its pit-to-plant solutions spanning everything from crushing and milling, pumping, flotation and separation through to tailings management and beyond.
With a customer base brimming with the world’s leading mining companies across commodities such as iron ore, gold, copper, nickel and lithium, FLSmidth aims to achieve “sustainable productivity through innovation”, a vision embodied by the OEM’s MissionZero strategy.
MissionZero is centred around driving a paradigm shift of zero emissions, water waste, and energy waste in mining by 2030 not only for FLSmidth’s own operations, but also for its customers.
This ambition becomes possible when multiple technologies are combined. An example of this is FLSmidth’s MissionZero Mine.
“To achieve zero emissions, it’s not simply about electrifying the mine operation; it’s also about changing the flowsheet using different technology, to reduce the energy and water needed for production,” FLSmidth APAC mining president Tamer Eid told Australian Mining.
FLSmidth found that if a mining company replaced a traditional wet milling SABC (SAG mill/ball mill/pebble crusher) circuit, standard flotation cells and a cyclone sand tailings dam with the MissionZero Mine, the operation would realise a 30–45 per cent reduction in overall energy consumption, along with an 80 per cent reduction in water consumption.
The operation would also realise increased metals recovery.
“If we put in different technology together such as coarse flotation, REFLUX flotation, our market leading high-pressure grinding rolls (HPGRs) and dry stack tailings, you can actually change the flowsheet to reduce your energy and water demands significantly,” Eid said.
Comminution (making a big rock into a small rock) is estimated to use in the vicinity of 2–3 per cent of the world’s total energy.
“So when you have different technology that can change the game of comminution and reduce that energy consumption, that is significant,” Eid said.
FLSmidth’s OK Mill can use dry grinding instead of a water-based method, saving on water and energy usage by 10–20 per cent kWh/t (kilowatt-hour per tonne) in the process.
HPGRs also use a dry grinding process and are therefore a more sustainable alternative than SAG mills and ball mills.
Miners will not only save energy with HPGRs, but they also achieve emissions reduction indirectly from the elimination of the steel grinding media needed inside SAG and ball mills.
Coarse flotation also reduces energy consumption.
“Coarse flotation enables miners to beneficiate with larger particle sizes, meaning they can grind less to liberate the ore, using up to 45 per cent less energy per kWh/t,” Eid said.
“With coarse flotation alone, you reduce the amount of energy needed and therefore the amount of energy generation required to deliver the same throughput, and it can be applied to existing circuits.”
There are also opportunities in tailings management.
“Instead of having a tailings pond, you can have dry stack tailings, where tailings are stacked on top of one another,” Eid said.
“That means you can recover up to 95 per cent of valuable water, utilise it back in the process, and you don’t have big tailings dams and high-water usage.
“Especially in the drier places of the world, such as some of the mines in the north-west and Pilbara region of Western Australia, water is at a premium. For some new mines, companies need to have different dewatering and tailings arrangements to enable these mines to be viable.”
Eid said while each of these technologies is effective independently, they produce even greater results when combined.
“We work closely with customers to help integrate these different technologies – using our end-to-end flowsheet capability. This delivers extra value and supports not only changing the NPV (net present value) of the mine itself, but also fulfilling their corporate social responsibility goals,” he said.
Aalborg CSP
Aalborg CSP is another Danish company with sustainability solutions for the Australian mining industry.
The company’s technology – which supports solar, boilers, heat pumps and storage – replaces the energy derived from fossil fuels with energy generated from the sun, which can be stored and distributed to satisfy demand for electricity, heating and process steam production, cooling and desalination.
Via the company’s heat exchanger and heat pump solutions, excess electricity from wind and photovoltaic (PV) technology can be converted to heat or process steam to operating conditions of between 40°C and 565°C.
The thermal energy solution can be integrated with other renewable energy solutions and Aalborg CSP’s high- or low-temperature storage technologies to secure a constant supply of energy.
Andreas Zourellis, Aalborg CSP’s vice president of technical sales – international markets, said the Danish EPC’s (engineering, procurement, and construction) solutions are well suited to the dry terrains of the Australian mining landscape.
“What is intriguing and special about the Australian mining industry is some mine sites are very remote and decentralised and they are in locations where the sun is shining for most of the day,” he told Australian Mining.
“By combining a solar thermal plant, whether it’s low-temperature or high-temperature, with thermal battery as grid-scale storage, we can offer a completely decentralised system generating green heat or green electricity.”
Aalborg CSP installed the world’s first integrated energy system based on the CSP technology at Sundrop Farms’ greenhouse facilities in Port Augusta, South Australia, in 2016.
The 36MWth (megawatt-thermal) system generates 1700MWh (megawatt-hour) of electricity per year and 20,000MWh of heat per year, and desalinates 250,000 cubic metres of water per year.
Zourellis said that while this case study is relevant to the agriculture industry, a similar energy system could be used in the resources sector.
“The Australian mining industry uses extensive amounts of energy to desalinate water or treat water that can be used later for mining processes,” he said.
“We can power a desalination unit with solar power and then provide fresh water. This is already up and running in Port Augusta.”
With water scarcity a global issue and saline wastewater ever-present on a mine site, desalination is a cost-effective way of reusing water. Other than providing emissions free heat and electricity, Aalborg CSP’s thermal energy solution gives a desalination unit the green tick.
DHI
“Our world is water.”
DHI has an expert understanding of the world’s most precious resource and uses this know-how to support the Australian mining industry.
The Danish software developer has traditionally provided the Australian resources sector with water modelling tools that can be used to understand their water impacts and conduct forecasting. For example, DHI’s FEFLOW tool has been used for decades to model open-pit dewatering, with many Australian Tier 1 miners implementing this solution.
The company is now moving into the digital advisory space through its MIKE Mine solution, which provides real-time monitoring, forecasting, scenario-testing and reporting of water operations on a mine site.
MIKE Mine – which DHI calls a “decision-support system” – sees the company build a web-based browser for mining companies, combining operational data and planning data in the process.
DHI then brings in forecast models to understand the direction of the site’s water operations, before combining all available data to create a water action plan for the mining operation.
DHI executive vice president Stefan Szylkarski said the ultimate goal was to provide mining operations with a real-time, automated water management system.
“Instead of someone running it (water management) manually, we’ve put these processes in a web-based application in the cloud,” he told Australian Mining.
“(MIKE Mine) runs continuously so the on-site team can go to a web-based application and look at how their dewatering is progressing in real-time, how their water operations are going at any one point in time.”
Advent Technologies
Advent Technologies is becoming another vital piece of the mining industry’s renewable energy puzzle.
Holding the intellectual property for next-generation HT-PEM (high temperature-proton exchange membrane) technology, the company develops, manufactures, and assembles complete fuel cell systems and supplies customers with critical components for fuel cells in the renewable energy sector.
Advent fuel cells are multi-fuel capable, meaning they work on hydrogen as it comes in many different forms (methanol, e-methanol, e-fuels, natural gas), thus eliminating the need for complex hydrogen infrastructures.
The company was listed on NASDAQ in February 2021 and has already deployed over 1000 telecom fuel cell units worldwide.
Advent’s fuel cells can provide up to 100kW of critical power and have proven an essential back-up power source for the telecommunications industry, especially in countries that regularly experience natural disasters.
The fuel cells are applicable to the mining industry, where they can provide a reliable power source for operations or work as a hybrid system alongside renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Advent’s vice president of sales and marketing Alan Kneisz said the fuel cells are instrumental where the use of grid power is challenging or not possible, which can be the case in the remote expanses of the Australian mining industry.
Kneisz said that while Advent can’t yet compete with diesel from a price perspective, fuel cells will become increasingly important as their total cost of ownership decreases and the world nears the net-zero thresholds of 2030 and 2050.
“We are working with the mining industry on smaller applications and, as our technology develops and we have more partnerships, we aim to develop them into bigger applications such as larger scale power stations,” he told Australian Mining.
C.C. Jensen
A global leader in oil maintenance, C.C. Jensen’s CJC offline oil filtration solutions reduce component wear and oil consumption on a mine site, in turn delivering major efficiency improvements.
C.C. Jensen provides solutions for various pieces equipment across a mining operation, whether it be a haul truck, crushing equipment, hydraulic loading systems, flotation and grinding applications in a processing plant, or one of many other options.
The filtration solutions can support diesel fuel, hydraulic oil and gear oil, enabling unique productivity and environmental outcomes for each application.
“With diesel, we want make sure that finer particles and water are not present,” C.C. Jensen’s business manager for mining in the Asia Pacific Nicolaj Vestergaard Sandt told Australian Mining. “Water in diesel creates bacterial growth and will create rust in the bottom of the tank.”
Sandt said if contaminants get to the injectors or the fuel pump, they can get stuck in the fine tolerances and ruin the equipment.
“These are failures that have been common in the world for many years, but there is no need for those failures,” he said. “They shouldn’t be there if we remove the core reason why.”
C.C. Jensen can extend the lifetime of hydraulic systems by up to 95 per cent through oil filtration, Sandt said, while the company’s gear oil solutions have significantly improved the efficiency of heavier applications such as crushers and mills, leading to a 60 per cent reduction in the use of spare parts.
C.C. Jensen has demonstrated its ability to avoid three out of four shutdowns, and one copper mine in Chile was even able to reduce shutdowns by 87 per cent by using the Danish company’s oil filtration solutions.
Despite almost daily in-line filter changes, the copper mine previously had to make oil changes every two months as dirt and contamination accumulated in the oil.
Since installing offline oil filtration, however, the Chilean mine shuts down once a year for six hours for a single oil change, not only reducing downtime but limiting oil usage and the operation’s CO2 footprint.
As the Australian mining industry races towards a decarbonised future, there is going to be greater demand for environmental innovations. And as a global sustainability trailblazer, Denmark will continue to be an important part of the net-zero narrative.
This feature appeared in the October issue of Australian Mining.
