One of the main challenges in supplying water to remote mine sites in Australia is establishing adequate and socially acceptable infrastructure – such as pipelines – to carry out this task.
Another major consideration is finding adequate pipe-friendly water sources to service individual mining projects in dry regional areas.
To help tackle these issues, the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI), via its Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry (CWiMI), has developed a participatory planning framework which aims to maximise the benefits of shared water infrastructure in these locations.
CWiMI has identified desalinated water as the preferred supply option – a practice which is already in place within the global mining sector.
According to the centre’s research fellow Dr Liliana Pagliero, the framework uses in-person workshops and geographic information system (GIS) software to facilitate knowledge-sharing between stakeholders while planning infrastructure networks based on economic, environmental and social criteria.
The study embraces the findings of a three year research project in which the participatory planning approach was used to establish shared desalinated water supply infrastructure in the Atacama region of Chile.
“The mining industry is investing billions of dollars in desalination to secure future water supplies, and this level of investment will continue,” Dr Pagliero said.
“Our goal is to maximise the value of these investments to the region as a whole while minimising the financial and socio- environmental costs.
“At the centre of this new approach is an interactive wate supply tool we designed that allows users to plan a supply network based on a range of information and preferences.
“The software identifies the desalinated water supply options, including desalinated plant locations and pipeline routes, which optimise economic and socio-environmental value for a region for a particular scenario.
“A GIS visual interface allows water user groups, such as mines and communities, to view and discuss water supply options, and their socio-environmental and economic trade-offs.
“This allows a common understanding to be reached of the costs and benefits and allows stakeholders to explore their ideas for new options.”
SMI executive director Dr Doug Aitken, who led the 12 person research team that looked at the situation in Chile, emphasised the importance of the work when applied to other water-scarce mining locales in countries like Australia and Peru.
A critical challenge, the researchers found, was managing the spectrum of potential adverse social and environmental impacts while providing fair and sustainable water access benefits to the region as a whole.
The Chilean framework, they said in a paper published in Environmental Science and Policy, is based on a modelling tool that facilitates a collaborative understanding of the regional context, and both optimises and maps candidate water supply networks and the associated trade-offs between economic, environmental and social performance criteria.
This approach aims to encourage dialogue between all interested parties and contributes to a more informed, fair, consented, long term and sustainable integration of desalinated seawater into regional water supply schemes.
Population growth, economic development and lifestyle shifts, the paper notes, have resulted in ever increasing water demand, thereby exerting significant pressures on resources.
In many regions, water scarcity is expected to be exacerbated in the coming decades by the combined effects of growing water withdrawals, the impacts of climate change, increasing demand for environmental flow protection and water quality degradation.
Management or adaptation options to face water scarcity comprise those on the supply side, who are investing in water infrastructure (such as pipelines) and treatment technologies to permit access to new sources, as well as members of the demand camp.
Furthermore, the implementation of either type of measure, or any combination, depends on a variety of factors and circumstances such as the development level of the country, planning horizons and the state of exhaustion of existing water sources.
These management measures, however, are usually engineered by policy makers in a top-down approach without explicitly considering social and political factors, or in silos by a particular group without consideration of the surrounding context. Additionally, these approaches have shown to have structural and social limitations.
The researchers said the proposed framework consists of three stages. The first involves an understanding of the region as a whole, which is necessary in order to identify challenges, opportunities and stakeholders. The second is the modelling process, including quantifying associated costs and trade-offs, while the third involves the analysis of the solution and its refinement.
These stages are interactive and anticipated to be applied iteratively – in particular the refining of a database when the modelling uncertainties become apparent. Although the framework was developed around desalination, it could in fact be used to support the planning of water supply infrastructure in general.
It supports the identification of opportunities and challenges early on by requiring consideration of the regional context, incorporating economic, environmental and social aspects as well as effectively visualising candidate optimal water supply networks and related trade-offs.
“All aspects of the planning framework aim to allow applications in a workshop setting and participatory specification of scenarios, cost functions and analysis of solutions,” the researchers said.
“These capabilities promote discussion, dialogue, and contribute to the achievement of consensual solutions between different interested parties, thus effectively contributing to participatory planning.
“The main characteristic of the methodology presented is that the modelling tool that allows the exploration of the alternatives is not fixed, but is the result of the context of the case study.
“The application to the Atacama region in Chile demonstrated the capabilities and aim of the participatory modelling process.
“Following the methodology described, the methodology can be applied to any case study. Economic and environmental costs functions used in the application can be used as guidelines for a different case study.”
Dr Aitken said Chile was far down the path towards supplying mines in arid regions with desalinated seawater, and the recent announcement of a 600 kilometre pipeline to supply BHP Ltd’s giant Olympic Dam copper-gold-uranium operation in South Australia shows the Australian mining sector is following the same path.
“The opportunities for these regions are immense, but so are the challenges of ensuring the water supply is cost-effective, equitable, and has minimal environmental impact,” he added.
