A comparative life cycle assessment of material handling systems for sustainable mining

Date

2016-06-01

Author

Erkayaoğlu, Mustafa
Demirel, Nuray

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

208
views

0
downloads

In this comprehensive LCA comparison study, main objectives are to investigate life cycle environmental impacts of off-highway mining trucks and belt conveyors in surface mining. The research methodology essentially entails determination of the functional unit as 20,000 tons/day coal production transported for 5 km distance. After the system boundary was selected as the entire life cycle of material handling systems including pre-manufacturing of steel parts and plastic components, manufacturing, transportation, and utilization data was compiled from equipment manufacturers and the Eco-invent database. Life cycle impact categories for both material-handling systems were identified and the developed model was implemented using SIMAPRO 7.3. Climate change and acidification were selected as major impact categories as they were considered to be major concerns in mining industry. Although manufacturing stage had a significant impact on all of the environmental parameters, utilization stage was the hotspot for the selected impact categories. The results of this study revealed that belt conveyors have a greater environmental burden in climate change impact category when compared to the trucks. On the other hand, trucks have a greater environmental burden in acidification impact category when compared to the belt conveyors. This study implied that technological improvement in fuel combustion and electricity generation is crucial for the improvement of environmental profiles of off-highway trucks and belt conveyors in the mining industry. The main novelty of this study is that it is the first initiative in applying LCA in the Turkish mining industry.

Subject Keywords

LCA, Material handling, Sustainability, Surface mining

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/47128

Journal

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.03.011

Collections

Department of Mining Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

A preliminary study on the use of reservoir simulation and coal mine ventilation methane measurements in determining coal reservoir properties Erdoğan, Sinem Setenay; Okandan, Ender; Kracan, Cevat Özgen; Department of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering (2011) This thesis investigates methane emissions and methane production potentials from abandoned longwall panels produced or emitted due to mining activities either from coal seam or any underlying or overlying formations. These emissions can increase greenhouse gas concentrations and also pose a danger to the underground working environment and to miners. In addition to the safety issues, recovery and utilization of this gas is an additional source of energy. In this study, methane concentrations measured from ...
A New approach to 3-dimensional optimization of ultimate pit geometry for open pit mines with variable overall slope angles Altuntov, Firdevs Kübra; Erkayaoğlu, Mustafa; Department of Mining Engineering (2019) The mining activities have high economic risks and the determination of the optimum ultimate pit limit of an ore body greatly affects the economic feasibility of an open pit mine. Due to necessity of determining optimum pit limit, many researchers proposed different algorithms and heuristic methods which maximize economic value of a mine while satisfying operational constraints and extraction sequence constraints. In most of the proposed methods, overall slope angle variation in the pit is constant. However...
An approach on dilution and ore recovery / loss calculations in minearal reserve estimations at the Cayeli mine, Turkey Soyer, Nihat; Güyagüler, Tevfik; Department of Mining Engineering (2006) Dilution and ore recovery/loss have an important role in calculation of mineral reserves. Each percent increase in dilution and decrease in recovery negatively affects economic value of the reserve. These parameters are mainly controlled by the quality of the mine design and stoping practice. This study provides an approach developed for dilution and recovery/ore loss calculations. The contribution of mine design software (MineSight) and the recent survey technique called Cavity Monitoring System (CMS) were...
Integrated deterministic approaches for productivity index of reservoirs depleted by horizontal wells and undergone multiphase flow conditions Al-Rbeawi, Salam (Elsevier BV, 2019-04-01) This paper introduces new integrated approaches for estimating pseudo-steady state productivity index (PI) and shape factor of oil and gas reservoirs drained by horizontal wells and dominated by multiphase flow conditions. These approaches couple PVT data, relative permeability curves, and pressure distribution models during pseudo-steady state flow (PSS). The objective is eliminating the uncertainties of applying single phase flow models and substantially comprising the realistic parameters that govern mul...
A stochastic approach in reserve estimation Kök, Mustafa Verşan (Informa UK Limited, 2006-12-01) Geostatistics and more especially stochastic modeling of reservoir heterogeneities are being increasingly considered by reservoir analysts and engineers for their potential in generating more accurate reservoir models together with usable measures of spatial uncertainty. Geostatistics provides a probabilistic framework and a toolbox for data analysis with an early integration of information. The uncertainty about the spatial distribution of critical reservoir parameters is modeled and transferred all the wa...

Citation Formats

M. Erkayaoğlu and N. Demirel, “A comparative life cycle assessment of material handling systems for sustainable mining,” JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, pp. 1–6, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/47128.