Abstract
Mining is one of the few industries that can use low quality water for processing. Where mines are in arid climates, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile, there have also been increasing regulatory pressures on the use of fresh and brackish groundwater sources. In the last decade, this has resulted in mines moving towards the use of seawater to supply their operations, which often has to be transported 100s of km inland from the coast.
The corrosiveness of seawater introduces an increased corrosion risk for these projects and is not always managed in a proactive way from the design stage. This can have severe implications for the ongoing operational performance of the mine.
This paper will present a case study, which will outline the challenges and lessons learned with corrosion in a Mine project in Chile where the internal corrosion of the seawater conveyance line caused a number of technical, project schedule and budget impacts during the commissioning stage of the project. The lessons learned are used to highlight the opportunities for evolving engineering design of mines to incorporate corrosion management from the beginning of a project and allow this specific issue to be controlled in an optimal way.
