Why Mining Engineering?

“It is just a gravel pit! I t is not rocket science!” How many times do mining engineers hear these words from those outside the profession who would pretend to build and operate a mine?

Someone has calculated that for every 10,000 mineral occurrences that are evaluated, only 1 will become a profitable mine. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if it gets repeated often enough on the internet it will soon be a moot point. It will have entered the collective consciousness as truth and thus join the ranks of such whoppers as;

• Prostitutes enjoy being abused by the fat, ugly and other men who abuse them.
• Western democracies resulted from beating up on the Muslims.
• Christianity caused the Dark Ages.
• Galileo suffered for his zeal for science

Stuff like that.

Given the high risk and low probability of success, the role of the mining engineer is to identify areas of risk and collect the information and data necessary to understand and mitigate the risks or to eliminate them entirely. It has also been estimated that the average time from mineral deposit discovery to putting a mine in operation is 8 years. These are years when enormous sums of money are being spent with the risk that the mine will not be profitable. Mining engineering, then, properly understood, is the study and management of risk. Anyone who exclaims, “It is not rocket science!” has just identified themselves as someone who is about to lose a lot of money – most of it probably not their own.

In this sense then, the role of the mining engineer during the formative stages of the project is a little like an insurance policy. The planning of a project is inexpensive relative to the construction of a project and the cost of changes to the project during construction resulting from inadequate planning can be several times what the cost of doing the initial planning would have been. But owners of resources often do not want to take the time and spend the money to understand their resource and make the most informed decisions about how to develop the resource. In fact, they build without insurance because, after all, … “it is not rocket science”.