Getting the right timeframe and adopting the correct investment planning approach are key differentiators between good and bad mining, according to Alcoa Corp's top executive.
Companies have different approaches to mining, with some having very positive results and others relatively poor ones, Alcoa chief executive officer Roy Harvey said. "It gets back to how you think about those timescales involved. When you consider the fact that, by nature, a mine is going to be 5-10 years of development, and then decades of production followed by reclamation at the end, it's a long timescale to think about creating a social license and continuing to relicense it," he said. "Sometimes we find mining companies that have been much more short-term focused on getting in and extracting as much value as possible - which at the very least is very sub-optimal from a resource perspective and how you actually use a deposit, how it's shaped in the ground, how you can optimize and maximize the value created out of that particular deposit," he told Metal Bulletin this week...