When Dendra Systems recently sponsored a CPPA event exploring the mining industry’s environmental future, Australian Mining was on hand to document the key takeaways.
Queensland has long been a bastion of Australia’s mining industry, supplying key materials for the world’s continued development and industrialisation.
And with any mining activity come legacies, as well as the responsibility for companies and stakeholders to prepare sites for life after mining.
Queensland has an established workforce dedicated to supporting the state’s mine closure and rehabilitation practices. Financially backed by the Queensland Treasury and the financial provisioning scheme (FPS), the workforce involves practical and technical support from the Department of Resources.
Dendra is also a key player in Queensland’s mine remediation, providing technology, data and domain expertise to accelerate and smarten ecosystem analysis.
The environmental technology company leverages its timely and actionable ecosystem insights to develop restoration strategies for relevant stakeholders.
Dendra Systems was recently joined by the Queensland Treasury and Department of Resources at a networking event run by the CPPA (Closure Planning Practitioners Association) in Brisbane, where three speakers discussed the current state of play for mine remediation and abandoned mines management in the state.
The financial provisioning scheme commenced in April 2019 to manage Queensland’s financial risk and exposure to resource projects that have not complied with their environmental management and rehabilitation obligations.
The FPS provides a source of funds to the Department of Resources to carry out rehabilitation projects, remediation activities and research – this is what we know as the financial provisioning fund.
Queensland Treasury’s acting scheme manager for the FPS, Peter Fox, discussed the nuts and bolts of the scheme, while executive director technical services at the Department of Resources, Andrew Grabski, elaborated on how the state is implementing FPS funds.
Three FPS-funded projects include the Jumna, Golden Gate and Chariah tailings storage facilities.
“We were allocated $2 million out of the financial provisioning scheme in 2022, which we directed to three separate tailings storage facilities,” Grabski said.
“Jumna is an old reef tin mining processing facility with quite a large tailings dam, as well as acid mine drainage, heavy metals and various other things.
“We have allocated $1 million to this project, where we’re undertaking all the necessary investigations to come up with a concept of engineering to apply for further funds to fully decommission the tailings facility.”
The Department of Resources has allotted the remaining $1 million of its FPS budget to assess and remediate the Golden Gate and Chariah tailings storage facilities.
“Golden Gate is a fairly large gold mine and tailings dam near Croydon (in western Queensland),” Grabski said.
“There are significant problems (there), including with existing decommissioning works, so half a million dollars will be used to undertake investigations to understand the cause of the remediation failure and develop detailed designs to rectify the issues.
“As for Chariah, this is another tailings facility near Charters Towers (south-west of Townsville), which has acid mine drainage, heavy metals and various other problems in relation to nearby creeks and waterways.”
Grabski said there has been a significant amount of rehabilitation done on Chariah’s tailings dam, but there is still a large adjacent footprint where tailings, process water and other contaminants are present.
The Department of Resources has allocated $500,000 from the FPS to explore options to remediate contaminated material downstream from the rehabilitated Chariah tailings storage facility.
Beyond its FPS-funded projects, the Department of Resources has had some wins elsewhere as part of its Abandoned Mines Lands Program (AMLP).
This includes the Goondicum remediation project near Monto, north-west of Brisbane, which was abandoned in October 2020. Goondicum was an ilmenite mine located in the headwaters of the Burnett River.
“The Burnett River is quite a sensitive catchment, and the Goondicum mine was left in a pretty poor state with remnants of various gear, instability around pipes and heavily erodible material,” Grabski said. “So we carried out lots of initial care and maintenance and did plenty of work with the landowner. There was some fantastic work done by the team to get the site under control.
“We also dealt with on-site infrastructure, and then progressively moved towards what we call the rehabilitation of the eastern domain.
“We got this project done in a couple of years.”
Another successful project was the Collingwood tin remediation project near Cooktown in far north Queensland, which was abandoned in 2015 and transferred to the Department of Resources in 2017.
This site was successfully rehabilitated in recent years and saw the restoration of traditional lands for subsequent use by the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people and local communities.
“All of the rehabilitation was done in consultation with the Traditional Owners, which is the Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation, and then a sub-committee of elders which signed off on the closure plan for that site,” Grabski said.
Located adjacent to the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, the Collingwood remediation project saw contaminated water storages removed and contaminated mine waste materials capped, with 87 per cent of project expenditure going to local and regionally based businesses, 62 per cent of which were Indigenous-owned companies.
“It was very significant for us to work so closely with the Aboriginal people up there,” Grabski said. “It was important to ensure the safety of the site for the Traditional Owners and the local communities, and to protect sensitive receptors such as the Annam River.”
Dendra – which has been a key contributor to Queensland mine remediation projects like Goondicum and Collingwood in recent years – has unlocked new techniques and capabilities for ecosystem restoration.
Dendra regional sales manager Rhonda Bulmer explained the company’s offerings in more detail at the CPPA networking event.
“We have a wide range of capabilities to help our customers achieve their rehabilitation goals,” she said. “We do this through a unique remote sensing data collection, which we couple with AI and a technology-led approach.
“This enables us to deliver more successful mine rehabilitation outcomes for our customers.”
Bulmer said stakeholders, now more than ever, need actionable information to be able to make informed business decisions. This is where technology is critical.
“Some key environmental technology outcomes that Dendra provides, such as trend metrics, intervention management, ecology-aware machine learning and automation, each of these supports the abandoned mines program in Queensland,” she said.
“We support our customers by becoming a partner, meaning we actively collaborate with them to achieve end results. Our technology can enable customers to generate information to prepare regulatory reports, while allowing them to monitor their operations accurately and coherently in real-time.
“We’re able to collect tens of thousands of hectares of actionable information, which can be quickly digested and allow stakeholders to put their attention where it needs to go.
“This supports better insights, more targeted interventions and also significantly reduces costs, which we know is a big factor in the choices needed to be made in the environment.”
Bulmer said Dendra’s holistic suite of technology offerings support more effective mine rehabilitation at a lower cost.
“We understand the challenges abandoned mines face,” she said.
“But through the information we collect through our closure criteria and progressive rehabilitation practices, all the services we offer support a collaborative remediation process to ensure the best outcomes for all stakeholders.”
Through the collaborative work of the Queensland Treasury, Department of Resources and environmental technology innovators such as Dendra, Queensland has developed a focused approach to remediating the state’s abandoned mines and strategising for future mine closures.
So the industry can likely expect plenty more mine rehabilitation wins to come out of Queensland in the years to come.
This feature appeared in the July 2023 issue of Australian Mining.
