Unique Push Back Exercises, Practiced at Iron Ore Company of Canada to Optimize Humphrey Pit Designs

Abstract

Every day, more than 190K tonne of materials are mined in two main mining zones, Humphrey and Luce, at Iron Ore Company of Canada, the largest iron pellet producer in Canada. The large operating site, unique ore body shape and the severe weather conditions create a challenging environment for mine planning engineers. This paper provides general information about the current operating pits, the ore properties, and the mine planning software packages used on the site, and then it introduces the sequence of a series of push back exercises that have been, and planned to be practiced at IOCC to optimize the existing mine designs for Humphrey pit in order to both increase the reserve, and facilitate the orderly scheduling of production over time, by taking advantage of having more than one access ramp to the pit and consequently retrieving the remaining ramps. Finally, a numerical comparison between the reserves before and after the betterment in designs is presented.