Technoeconomics of Shotcrete Shaft Lining for Underground Sustainable Mining

Investment in underground mining is coming down all over the world, but deep reserves are available for extraction. Conventional sinking and lining of mine shaft projets or pits for winding men and materials from deep underground mines are getting very costly and being deferred. We found Polish technology of Shaft sinking with monolithic mining very efficient in Sudamdih, Monidih and Satgram projects in India. Russian collaboration for Jhanjra for shaft sinking and mine construction for large mine has been successful. Underground production is declining world over, while remaining reserves are at greater depths. Designing and coding original model programs by collecting actual field data to run the programs to determine cost benefit at different depths with standard diameters has been done. Most companies are avoiding deep mining projects, because of exorbitant cost of shaft sinking. As per experience of the researcher, pre-split blasting and shotcrete lining can be much faster and cheaper. So model programs have been designed and run with practical field cost and technical data, as exemplified in this paper. Future of deep pit mining will be assured with successful adoption of the method in projects, especially through hard rock strata.