Uncovering Cleaner Method for Underground Metal Mining: Enterprise-Level Assessment for Current and Future Energy Consumption and Carbon Emission from Life-Cycle Perspective

Minerals

卷:11

Sitong Ren¹  Gaofeng Ren²  Yang Liu² 

[1] School of Resources and Civil Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China;

[2] School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China;

关键词: metal mining;    energy consumption;    carbon dioxide emission;    life cycle assessment;    conservation supply curve;    abatement cost curve;   

DOI  :  10.3390/min11111170

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

China has committed to peak its carbon emissions by 2030, which puts forward a new issue for underground metal mines—selecting a cleaner mining method which requires less energy and generates less carbon emissions. This paper proposes an enterprise-level model to estimate life-cycle energy consumption and carbon emissions, which takes more carbon sources (e.g., cement and carbon sink loss) into consideration to provide more comprehensive insights. Moreover, this model is integrated with the energy-conservation supply curve and the carbon abatement cost curve to involve production capacity utilization in the prediction of future performance. These two approaches are applied to 30 underground iron mines. The results show that (1) caving-based cases have lower energy consumption and carbon emissions, i.e., 673.64 GJ/kt ore, 52.21 GJ/kt ore (only considering electricity and fossil fuel), and 12.11 CO₂ eq/kt ore, as compared the backfilling-based cases, i.e., 710.08 GJ/kt ore, 63.70 GJ/kt ore, and 40.50 t CO₂ eq/kt ore; (2) caving-based cases present higher carbon-abatement potential (more than 12.95%) than the backfilling-based vases (less than 9.68%); (3) improving capacity utilization facilitates unit cost reduction to mitigate energy consumption and carbon emissions, and the energy-conservation and carbon-abatement potentials will be developed accordingly.

【 授权许可】

Unknown