Sibanye Stillwater: Simulating Backfill Operations for Underground Mining

Sibanye Stillwater: Simulating Backfill Operations for Underground Mining

This case study, presented at Winter Simulation Conference 2021, focusses on the simulation model that was developed for Sibanye-Stillwater’s underground platinum mining operations in Nye, MT. Sibanye-Stillwater is a global mining company based in South Africa with Platinum Group Metals (PGM) and Gold mines in the Americas and Africa. One of their US mines in Montana, Stillwater Mining Company, owns and operates underground mines for PGM ore and a Concentrator plant. The process involves mining, transporting muck to surface, milling ore and backfilling the mined out cavities with tailings from milling. The circular dependency between mining and backfilling, along with variability for each task, makes it difficult to develop a realistic schedule, and efficiently deploy equipment and people. This presentation will review the simulation model used to help Sibanye understand how the bottleneck shifts every week, understand which resource is constraining underground mining from increasing production and understand where capital investments are needed in backfill operations.

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