Explosive consumption

[embomech]

Hi I am doing a little work the Life Cycle Assessment on diamond mining. I am trying to find a 'rule of thumb' for the tonne of rock mined, compared to the tonne of rock processed (so that I can work out on average how much explosive is used per carat of diamond). Is there a general rule that I could apply - say for every tonne of procssed ore, it is likely that X more tonnes were blasted.

Thanks!

 

[miningman]

Well good luck with that. I don't think Ive ever seen a value for explosive consumption per unit of end product and its not difficult to understand why. What mining method are we talking about?? Block caving has almost zero explosive consumption for primary breaking whereas sublevekl stoping has significant powder usage. What is the local geology..... if its a standard kimberlte pipe then with knowledge of the mining method any competant mining engineer could make the calculations whereas if its a reef type deposit (Snap Lake) the computed values per tonne will be totally different. How many kimberlite pipes are within the mine plan and what is the distance betwen them, because this defines the lateral extent of the workings on each level and development tends to very heavy on powder usage. What is the depth of the deposit because this tends to dramatically influence the length of the access ramp. And if you are talking open pit mining, then all previous comments are irrelevant and a totally different set of circumstances have to be evaluated.