Articles:

Canadian Business Journal

Ontario Mineral Exploration Review

NRG1-ECO: ENERGY CONSUMPTION OPTIMIZATION

The mining industry currently is overburdened with almost 60% of their energy costs being associated with ventilation. Typically, underground mines are ventilated continuously, based on peak demand and requirements. This can result in a considerable amount of air being needlessly cooled, heated and pushed around by fans. “With the right ventilation controls, a hard rock mine's annual power requirements and costs could be reduced by 30 to 40 % compared to a constant air delivery system," says Stephen Hardcastle, a Senior Research Scientist with the CANMET-MMSL, part of Natural Resources Canada who specializes in ventilation research.

Changing the way metal mines are ventilated could dramatically increase energy efficiency and spell big financial savings for mining companies world-wide. Deeper mines, higher energy costs, increased mobility and large diesel-powered vehicles are all pointing to the need for more energy-efficient ventilation systems.

Few areas in a mine need to be constantly ventilated as each employs a discontinuous process. Ventilation-On-Demand is an effective method to reduce the redundant use of air flow operating at peak capacity. Ventilation-on-Demand is a departure from traditional ventilation thinking and it operates on the variability associated with production requirements in the mine. Until now, there has not been one complete system that could intuitively interact with the mine design, control, ventilation maintenance, energy management, air quality and ventilation modelling in one streamlined operation.

BESTECH, one of Canada’s leading information technology / information services and engineering firms is completing an advanced control suite that will revolutionize and optimize underground mining ventilation. “Our team is testing technology that no other competitor has in place, says Marc Boudreau, BESTECH’S CEO. “The solution we are demonstrating, NRG1-ECO (Energy Consumption Optimization) is highly advanced, completely unique to the mining industry and is built upon the success of our initial NRG-1 software systems,” explains Boudreau. BESTECH’s experts have been providing Ventilation-On-Demand solutions to mines for the past seven years with impressive results. This new innovative hardware and software system will dramatically reduce a mine’s energy consumption and green house gas emissions while increasing its productivity, profitability and air quality.

To ensure that BESTECH’s new system meets the needs of various industries world-wide, Boudreau has formed a consortium of industry experts and organizations that will support BESTECH in establishing the industry best practices and standards of excellence for NRG1-ECO. Consortium members include organizations such as the Centre for Mining Excellence (CEMI) and international mine site technology providers. Mining giants Vale Inco and Xstrata Nickel are consortium members and will have the NRG1-ECO technology installed in their mines by May 2010.

NRG1-ECO’s human interface is a user-friendly web-based solution that will offer manual control, time-of-day scheduling, event-based control, asset monitoring and control as well as environmental monitoring and control. It uses sensors to monitor the location of miners, equipment and air quality and adjusts the ventilation accordingly. Vehicles can be tagged and tracked in the mine, engine performance can be logged and payload information can be gathered. Ventilation can be controlled in a fail-safe manner according to the simultaneous processing of incoming data including the vehicle type and location, the location of the miners and the mining activity.

NRG1-ECO will evaluate and react when the mine’s ventilation system is required to work at peak capacity; and when there is no activity, to work at reduced ventilation levels to increase efficiency. NRG1-ECO is configurable to each mine’s unique requirements and offers an open Industrial-Plug-and Play interface to allow system integration with other existing or new processes. The system offers the option of built-in communication redundancy ensuring operational robustness and complete reliability in case of an interruption in communication. Intelligent Zone Controllers are a key component to the field installed NRG1-ECO equipment. It integrates key control parameters, such as user configurable schedules, real-time environmental data and current activity-based control information. The Intelligent Zone Controller (IZC) increases the systems responsiveness as data can be analyzed and processed internally and does not have to be transmitted to the surface before a decision to respond is made. Communication failures do not compromise the system’s performance as it is designed to reliably handle environmental extremes in temperature, dust, moisture, and vibration present in the mining environment. Many types of environmental monitoring sensors can be integrated into the system to monitor temperature, humidity, Carbon Monoxide (CO),Carbon dioxide (CO2), Nitrogen Monoxide (NO) or Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and react to ventilation requirements immediately.

BESTECH’s main objective is to continue to install NRG1-ECO in operating mines by addressing each mine’s individual challenges and creating solutions that are applicable to the mining industry on a global scale. The BESTECH team will benchmark each installation to gain a better understanding of the significant impact NRG1-ECO’s control strategies can have on conserving energy use in the mining industry.

The expected benefits of NRG1-ECO to a mining company are a 20-30% reduction in yearly energy costs and a significant 5,000 tonne reduction of CO2 per year per mine site. In addition, a 5-10% increase in productivity is anticipated as a result of integrating the necessary asset monitoring technologies. As part of it's suite of tools, BESTECH also provides PORTAULS®, a process analysis software that presents key performance indicators, production reports and a play back utility for system troubleshooting as well as statistical reports opportunities for improvement. K2 Blackpearl, is an effective business process management system that completes NRG1-ECO. NRG1-ECO offers energy savings to many other energy consuming processes including dewatering, hoisting, compressed air and material handling processes.