2025 Visiting Lecturer Tour: Repurposing mines post-closure

Join the New Zealand Branch in Christchurch, for their visiting lecturer tour on repurposing mines post-closure.

About this event

The continuing demand for mineral commodities, including minerals critical to energy transition, and the ever-decreasing ore body grades, is inevitably resulting in escalating tailings production. The minerals industry is a waste management industry, which has not yet been fully embraced.

With the continuing and unacceptably high rate of tailings dam failures and fatalities, tailings management has become the key threat to the mining industry’s social and financial “licences” to operate. It is threatening the expansion of existing mines and the approval of new mines. Conventional tailings dams may not be approved in future. The industry will be judged by the poorest performer, wherever they operate.

This lecture by Emeritus Professor David Williams FAusIMM will focus on repurposing of the Genex Kidston mine site in Queensland to a renewable energy hub, and other sites across Australia. It will also provide a review of mine waste capping methodologies focussing on Queensland, highlighting the shortcomings and provide some examples of geomorphic mined landform design within Australia and globally.

Speaker/s

Professor David Williams

FAusIMM

Emeritus Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, The University of Queensland and Private Consultant

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Professor David Williams, recently retired from The University of Queensland, has over 45 years of teaching, research and consulting experience. He is internationally recognised for his expertise and experience in mine waste management and mine closure, particularly tailings dams. He was a member of the 2019 Brumadinho Failure Expert Panel. He initiated and largely delivers the highly successful AusIMM Professional Certificate Course in Tailings Management.

Professor Williams was a member of an Expert Panel investigating technical causes of the Brumadinho tailings dam failure and is on a number of Tailings Independent Technical Review Boards, including for Escondida.

He authored the 2009 and 2016 Tailings Management Handbook, as part of the Commonwealth Leading Practice Sustainable Development Program for the Mining Industry. Professor Williams is currently involved in the Working Party for the Australian National Committee for Large Dams Guidelines on Tailings Dams – Planning, Design, Construction, Operation and Closure, published in 2012, with an update in 2019.