Alternative Underground Mining Methods

Demands for alternative underground mining methods are now coming to the fore as the traditional underground mining methods are becoming unstainable given the increasing demands for environment friendly mining practices, greener technology, deeper mining depths, industry competitiveness and compliance to international transparency standards.

In Sweden, LKAB and Boliden are no exception and have now started to search for alternative underground mining methods to overcome their respective challenges. Nevertheless, the search for new underground mining methods has really started a decade ago (2010’s) resulting in the evolution of a new generation of hybrid underground mining methods (Saiang et al, 2020). These mining methods essentially unify two or three mining methods to take advantage of each other’s strengths for safe and efficient extraction ore (Sormunen & Saiang, 2022).