The Operational Geotechs’ team was thrilled to recently host a strongly attended half-day workshop at the Australian Centre for Geomechanics’ Deep Mining 2024 conference in Canada.
The event, held in late September in Montreal, successfully brought engineers with a focus on deep and high stress mining together, with attendees from all over the globe.
Our highly practical, case study-based workshop entitled Key Learnings from Mining in Challenging Geotechnical Environments attracted more than 100 participants, mostly geotechs.
Operational Geotechs (OG) Co-founder and Director Ben Barsanti chaired the workshop which featured 6 international speakers and thought provoking discussions.
“The deeper you go in mining, the harder the job gets and working as an onsite geotech can be quite isolating, which makes coming up with solutions to problems particularly challenging across the industry,” says Ben Barsanti, OG Co-founder and Director.
“There are also less opportunities now for formal shared learning opportunities, so the motivation behind this workshop was to bring geotechs together to learn from real life situations.
“There is no textbook to help when we are faced with operational problems, so we unpacked the technical details and practical solutions derived from actual geotechnical problems we’ve faced, including what worked, what didn’t and why, which the participant feedback told us was very valuable.
“We were motivated to host this workshop because of the success we’ve seen internally as our team members have shared their knowledge with each other and because OG brings together a unique breadth and depth of experience.”
Thanks to the ACG for giving us this opportunity and to our incredible presenters for their critical insights.
- Vincent Dagenais, Agnico Eagle Mines, Canada
Seismicity management at LaRonde mine
- Peter Andrews from Gold Fields Limited:
Holding up The World with a Bag of Marbles?
- Dr Mike Yao, Vale Base Metals, Canada
Rockburst risk mitigation strategies at Vale’s deep mining operations in Sudbury – case studies
- Jeremy Doolan, Operational Geotechs, Australia
Lessons learnt from a significant pillar yielding event
- Brad Simser, Glencore, Canada
What makes deep mining deep – a strong brittle rock perspective
- Ash Page, Operational Geotechs, Australia
Transitions in the big Ms – magnitudes, management and money
