Our Strategy

Introducing new technology to industry

CRC ORE is the first large scale research initiative to bring together ore body knowledge, mass mining, blasting engineering, mineral processing, spatial modelling and resource economics.

Over the last 30 years, the average grade of mined Australian ore bodies has halved, while the waste removed to access the minerals has more than doubled. This in turn has led to a 70% increase in energy consumption across mining operations.

CRC ORE will address this challenge by facilitating a fundamental transformation of the methods used by Australia's mining and minerals industry to evaluate and extract mineral deposits. This will include the capability to comprehensively characterise, model and evaluate the economic and environmental impact of improved mineral-extraction methods.

CRC ORE will develop technology that will allow the lower grade ores now being encountered to be economically and eco-efficiently mined for the ongoing benefit of Australia.

Read more about the Challenges for Industry.

Integrated tools and techniques to enable optimisation of resource extraction.

In order to achieve this transformation CRC ORE has commenced an Integrated Research Program comprising Resource Characterisation, Resource Extraction and Resource Evaluation.

The development of technology, software and methodologies that incorporate the new metrics of energy, water and CO2 will enable the inclusion of energy efficiency into daily business assessments.

This fundamental transformation will be achieved by the CRC ORE research and industry consortia (CRC ORE Participants) systematically working together towards the ultimate goal of delivering methods for fully integrated operational control systems.

To read more about CRCs and CRC ORE's strategy for the future, click here (PDF).

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