Global Mining Review Highlights the Use of Satellite-Based Risk Assessments

Global Mining Review featured satellite-based risk assessments and how they help to support the mining industry in reducing the risks for tailings storage facilities’ (TSFs) failure.

Discussing the combined challenge of changing climate patterns, aging infrastructure and estimated losses from TSF failures in the years ahead, Value.Space’s Reijo Pold described the way satellite-based movement audits help the industry to get a head by identifying, understanding, and monitoring risks in almost real-time.

• Many of the world’s 29 000 – 35 000 TSFs are old and their design calculations may not have accounted for changing global climate patterns. Experts predict 13 catastrophic TSF failures between 2025-2029 with an average cost of US$2.5 billion per catastrophe.

• The world does not have enough engineers to monitor these assets as frequently as satellites that measure up to millimetre-scale movements on TSFs globally and as often as every two weeks.

• The underlying technology for satellite-based movement surveys was developed more than 30 years ago, but high costs meant that relatively few could afford to carry out these kinds of assessments.

• Now, however, not only have prices come down, but functionality has improved by leaps, meaning the technology has much more to offer stakeholders, risk engineers, and insurers.

Explore the article here.

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