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<p>Long-term production planning in open-pit mines should be conducted in a manner that satisfies current societal demand for mineral resources while maintaining an appropriate balance with environmental protection. Achieving such a balance requires that environmental considerations be systematically incorporated into mine design and production planning processes. Given the absence of a comprehensive framework for quantifying environmental costs in production planning, this study identifies the various categories of these costs and proposes practical methods for their quantification. Accordingly, a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed in which all environmental costs are directly and consistently integrated into the objective function based on ore and waste rock types. The proposed model enables the coherent integration of all environmental costs associated with open-pit mining into the production planning process and can be fully implemented within a three-dimensional block model framework. The results show that although the ultimate pit limit and production schedule derived from the proposed model lead to a lower apparent NPV, they offer a more realistic representation of actual mining conditions. A comparison of the evaluated scenarios indicates that directly incorporating environmental costs into the objective function of the proposed MILP model increases the total mine NPV in the case study by approximately 14.87% compared with a scenario that block model is designed as in conventional models in which environmental costs are excluded from the objective function and the total mine NPV is calculated including the related environmental costs. This result highlights that integrating environmental costs at the optimization stage supports more realistic and sustainability-oriented decision-making. In addition, the cost distribution analysis demonstrates that acid mine drainage (AMD) control costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission costs are the most influential environmental cost components affecting the project’s economic performance.</p>

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Incorporating environmental costs into long-term open-pit mine planning for sustainable resource optimization

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月21日

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  • Ali Salehi,
  • Morteza Osanloo,
  • Sajjad Afraei

摘要

Long-term production planning in open-pit mines should be conducted in a manner that satisfies current societal demand for mineral resources while maintaining an appropriate balance with environmental protection. Achieving such a balance requires that environmental considerations be systematically incorporated into mine design and production planning processes. Given the absence of a comprehensive framework for quantifying environmental costs in production planning, this study identifies the various categories of these costs and proposes practical methods for their quantification. Accordingly, a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed in which all environmental costs are directly and consistently integrated into the objective function based on ore and waste rock types. The proposed model enables the coherent integration of all environmental costs associated with open-pit mining into the production planning process and can be fully implemented within a three-dimensional block model framework. The results show that although the ultimate pit limit and production schedule derived from the proposed model lead to a lower apparent NPV, they offer a more realistic representation of actual mining conditions. A comparison of the evaluated scenarios indicates that directly incorporating environmental costs into the objective function of the proposed MILP model increases the total mine NPV in the case study by approximately 14.87% compared with a scenario that block model is designed as in conventional models in which environmental costs are excluded from the objective function and the total mine NPV is calculated including the related environmental costs. This result highlights that integrating environmental costs at the optimization stage supports more realistic and sustainability-oriented decision-making. In addition, the cost distribution analysis demonstrates that acid mine drainage (AMD) control costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission costs are the most influential environmental cost components affecting the project’s economic performance.