 Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us today for the latest in the HydroTerror Webinar series. Today's our first of a new focus in terms of our webinars. We have what we're calling enabling change webinars. Gavin, if you move to the next slide, please. So the people involved today and the purpose of this new format is to bring in industry leaders that we identify who we think have had a long career in a particular sector and also a successful career who have ideas on how various monitoring technologies could be applied to improve industry practice. So today we have Dr Gavin Mudd presenting, and I will provide you with a bit more details on his career shortly. Next slide, thanks, Gavin. Before we get started, just a few little things logistically. If you want to ask a question during the presentation, just use that Q&A button, which is depicted on your screen and type away. Really success in our minds from these presentations are lots of questions. We really are looking to share knowledge and collaborate to take the industry forward. So looking forward to getting plenty of questions from you. If we don't get through all of those questions today, we will address them and send you an email response soon after the webinar. All right, next slide, thanks, Gavin. So this is sort of a program for the day. As I said, the themes about enabling change, I will run through the objectives of this webinar in the next couple of slides. And then Gavin is going to take over and run through really a bit of a background on mine rehabilitation and his take on it. Some of the regulatory requirements around mine rehabilitation. But then most importantly, I suppose, looking at the case studies of what has been successful. A lot of you may not be aware of what hasn't been successful. And what's been truly ugly. Gavin has some really strong ideas on how we can improve, particularly around monitoring the success of mine rehabilitation. And a portion of his presentation relates to that. One thing that is emphasized in here is community expectations around mining these days. Well, it used to be in the old days that the regulator really set the bar, but certainly in more recent times it is about community expectations. And that has in some instances got ahead of where the regulators are setting the bar. So it is interesting this whole concept of license to operate really. And Gavin touches on that as well in this presentation. The last part of this will be the Q&A session where Michelle will be coordinating that for us, reading out your questions. And Gavin and myself will do our best to answer them. Next slide, thanks Gavin. Okay, so what's Hydroterror hoping to achieve with these enabling change series? Really, what I'm seeing at the moment, Hydroterror is a technology business that applies that, particularly in environmental monitoring is an exponential change in the capacity for environmental monitoring, whether it's drones or satellite sensors, telemetry and data analysis. But what often is the case in life is that technology, the what can be enabled with technology takes a long time to be adopted. So what we're hoping to do is to help to stimulate and enable through increased knowledge in the people watching these webinars and through showing through the ideas of these guest speakers how we can move forward more quickly as industries. Really, because at the end of the day, adoption of these technologies will increase productivity and reduce environmental footprints because of the increased resolution in the state of play of a business at any point in time. Next slide, thank you Gavin. So just to reiterate, we're hoping to stimulate thought on how rapidly changing capabilities of monitoring technologies can be applied in industry. And we believe that will facilitate operational efficiency and environmental impacts. We're hoping to combine technology knowledge and the wisdom of these long term industry leaders to provide a bit of a stage to facilitate those sorts of discussions where we bring these things together. So this is really about trying to enable collaboration. Next slide, thank you. So where's the wisdom coming from today? Well, Gavin is presenting and he has a long and highly established career starting as an environmental engineer graduating from RMIT back in 1995. Really, his career has focused on mining pretty much the whole way through, but he did start with a PhD on coal ash impacts in the Latrobe Valley. Since then, he really has pursued a very successful academic career at the University of Queensland, Monash University and now he's gone back home to his roots back at RMIT. He has been at the forefront of environmental issues in mining for the last 25 years with his research recognized as the most authoritative around the world. Collaborations that Gavin's been involved in include the US Geological Survey, Columbia University, Yale University, as well as across Europe and extensively in Australia. He has many publications and has underpinning that a whole lot of unique data sets. Gavin's been very proactive working with the communities out there including Indigenous communities. He's had quite a lot of key focus on the uranium mining, but really has a very broad range of experience across mining. I would say Gavin is the most passionate person I have met around mine sites and mine site closure and their impact on the environment and I'm looking forward to this presentation today. So over to you Gavin and thanks very much for being involved. No worries, thank you Richard. It's a pleasure to be able to contribute today and I guess there's always a lot of detail that one can go to. So what I want to achieve today is really a bird's eye view of the primary ideas and I guess really the most simple idea is that we're told that we do mine rehabilitation and we're told that it's a lot successful. And I think we can really challenge those two myths because that doesn't always happen. But let alone how do we really judge successful mine rehabilitation. So I think the communities I'm working with of course are dealing with sometimes quite polluting mines or they've heard those stories and again in the digital age we can all hear these stories much more easily now than we ever have before. So I think we do need to think differently about how we go about demonstrating that we have done rehabilitation and then also proving that it's been successful and so to do that we need the data, we need the monitoring and so how do we remove all of those things together and so hopefully if I can achieve some good thoughts or some good discussion on that today then as I quote a good old spot my job here is done. Now this is part of the world that's just outside the main flood zones I think at the moment but to go west of the Sunshine Coast there's a little spot just where this yellow circle is that was a gold mine. To go in it's called the Agricola Gold Mine of course Agricola was the old German scholar of mining back 500 years ago but you go into this area now but from 30 years ago when that mine operated you can't find it. There's really no obvious evidence that there was ever a gold mine there. Now the Agricola Gold Mine operated for something like six months there's no production records, it left an acid mine drainage disaster there was a cyanide accident and though there were extremely rare cases where a government has stepped in and actually closed a mine and so then there was no bond and so government has then had to accept the liability of how to go about remediating that site. Now you look at it now and this is just using Google Earth you can't find any evidence of that mine. So to me that raises a question and I'd be interested to know how many people have ever heard of the Agricola Gold Mine and it's certainly not a well-known story but the point is it a case of successful mine rehabilitation and I think the answer to that is probably yes but again we have no data to prove that and again it's one of the things that I guess we always have to think about and if we have no data we can't say yes, we can't say no all we can say is we have no data but if we want to be able to say we're successful we really need good data to be able to back that claim up and that's called good science, good regulation and good policy and the communities that I've worked with over the years that's what they expect and so it's entirely reasonable and so this promise that we always do rehabilitation and it always works, those sort of true promises that have now been basically made for the decades here in Australia, I guess that's really what a lot of communities are looking for is where's the data to show that. So if you look at it from a broader point of view and you can see here in this slide the bottom photo is a much earlier photo of the Laurene open cut down in the La Trove Valley so the collage, tailings down at the back here is where I did my PhD looking at the seepage impacts on groundwater there and so normally we often hear agriculture has bigger impacts on the Australian landscape than mining and I often describe those as chronic trawl the land clearing is probably more of an acute phase but mining when it does disturb land it can be very acute especially when we're dealing with the large open cut mines that we see especially in the coal sector but also in others. Now we know also there are many examples around Australia and around the world of mine related pollution often related to processes such as acid and metalliferous drainage that also sometimes especially with uranium or other rare earth projects for example there can be radio nuclides involved as well. Now largely when we think about what's happened over the last sort of recent decades since the 1970s part of the whole need for environmental regulation mining was certainly one part of the justification for that obviously chemical factories, oil refineries and other sort of heavy industry and our air quality were also part of the reason we set up environmental regulation but part of the modern way that we deal with mining regulation is that we look at the need to rehabilitate so that there's some stable post mining land use whatever that may be and that the site is not releasing pollutants or contaminants out into the environment. But one of the things I think the real problems we have is that most of our mines are actually still operating there's actually very few that if you think about the way we should justify mine rehab as a stable or sustainable landscape which has some post mining land use we'd really need at least 10 years or more I think to verify that and to really demonstrate that the rehab is successful. And so if we start thinking about that you need at least 10 years after rehabilitation is finished and monitoring and so on and there's very few modern mines that have actually been closed and rehabilitated and were monitored for 10 years or more. And so if we start thinking about and that's the way communities would think about it and it's not unreasonable it's entirely rational to think about that because that's what the sort of we know the nature of the processes and so on. So in some ways we don't have a huge database of mines that have been actually arguably successfully rehabilitated and there's elements that we can certainly look at like an overburdened arm for a tailings dam but whole mine sites is something that we really haven't done a lot of yet but it's coming we know we've just closed the Hazelwood mine here in Victoria a few years ago we'll close the Anglesey mine there's going to be a lot more mines closed in the coming next 10, 20, 30 years than what we've closed so far. So this problem is going to be a very big one and one we need to make sure we get right. So if we look at this and I won't go through all of these but again a lot of this is the basics of mining we have our type of mine underground open carp, the waste rock dump, overburdened dump, the tailings dam, maybe some water management ponds and the process plants or power stations as it may be in the Troy Valley and so when we look at mine rehabilitation we have to think about all of these aspects that would be the physical safety, chemical safety, any remaining cyanide that may be present, say Victoria, maybe arsenic issues or you know say mercury for example for some sites you may have to consider radio-mucous issues or radiation issues but also we have to understand that mining rehabilitation has social issues that we have to think about as well whether that's changes in the economic activity, the workforce is almost definitely going to be lower for mine rehabilitation and operations so that changes the sort of social dynamics there as well and so all of that has to be considered with where community is up to and community have what I would always argue are often reasonable expectations and again those expectations are often set on what's being promised to them and what's being promised is good success rates and the fact that rehabilitation is required and always done. So in some ways all communities are expecting is exactly what industry and government have been saying for the last 40-50 years. Now the way that this has come to be there so some of the main ways we think about the regulatory process for mining and mine rehabilitation is there is a bond that's held, a financial bond but I think I really struggle to find a case where the actual cost of rehabilitation was less than the bond and I know of many many cases where the bond is always far in excess of the actual bond that's held and there's been the Victorian Auditor General's Office report recently looking at this in Victoria but also in New South Wales and Victoria and so these unfunded liabilities are looming large and so if we get this wrong the potential liability to government and communities and potentially the industry as well is certainly very large, potentially a bill of billions and billions of dollars. The exact delivery requirements do vary depending on which jurisdiction you're in so there's always sort of nuance there but basically there's these sort of expectations of making sure you've got physical safety, chemical safety some kind of ecosystem or post mining range use and this has really been since the start of what used to be of course the Australian Mining Industry Council which takes a lot of people back I'm assuming but nowadays we call them the Minerals Council of Australia and so since the 1970s the annual conference has been very strongly themed around the environmental performance of the mining industry and that has been changed more into sustainability language and our focus over the last 20 odd years. And so we can see some of that handbooks and the guidance that's produced either by the industry such as the NCA or by government such as the practice environmental management series that was done in the 1990s and a decade later we had the leading practice sustainable development handbooks developed for the industry and guidance in that way. So and a lot of these really talk about now case studies of Kingston and many others and some of the basic ideas that we use for mine rehabilitation Now in Victoria because of the issues in the Littrow Valley and I suppose some of the concerns around the longer term potential vulnerabilities there, earth resources have now required annual rehabilitation reporting and this is progressive, no the state does it in this way it's a slightly older screen capture but again this principle that we should be reporting publicly these are effectively public resources that are being mined so whether it be coal or gold so there is an expectation that the public interest is being protected and especially when you're looking at the fact that a lot of these mines in places like the Littrow Valley or elsewhere we're not just talking about the closure and rehabilitation of one mine we're talking about multiple so cumulative impacts and therefore how they interact with whether it be ground water surface water, the communities and biodiversity and so on and so I think getting better clarity, getting better public transparency I think is an important principle so we're seeing elements of this and I think that one of the things I really want to highlight is that we know of all the elements out there all right so we know exactly the types of technologies and other things that could be directed to looking at all of this so one of the biggest issues I guess I'm constantly arguing that we're certainly underestimating is acid and metallurphous drainage or aka acid mine drainage and the simple geochemistry there we take an iron sulfide we expose that to water and oxygen and the surface when we get our rust, our sulfuric acid and our heat and so that acid then in turn dissolves our petimettals and salts and so on and so and it's a pervasive problem it's a pervasive problem in the iron ore industry and coal, gold, lead zinc, nickel etc it's an issue that I think is still being very significantly underestimated across Australia and so we know and especially if you go back to in the state of Saxony which is now part of Germany he was documenting acid mine drainage problems in the Urgeberg the oil mountains region which is basically the divider between eastern side of Germany and what we now say is the Czech Republic so this is a long term problem and something that we've known about for a while I guess but again I think the difference these days is we're not just talking about small silver mines in Saxony we're talking about large scale mines in my case of wood and many others and so that scale is fundamentally much, much larger so let's talk about some case studies and I think red bank and I don't know if anyone can actually point to where red bank is on a map it's pretty obscure it's in the Gulf country literally right near the Northern Territory Queensland border I bet 20k's across into the Northern Territory side and it's a really, really small mine about 2.5 million tonnes of mine waste and we can see here you can see the active flow of acid mine drainage coming down so this is the waste rock done behind us here this mine was opened in the 1990s when bankrupt after 2 years and there was no bond despite the fact there was a legal requirement for a bond so we can see all the copper precipitating out through here so there's nice sort of aqua blue colours this is industrial grade solution in Hammerhands Creek this is about pH 3 or so and not that much more but you're dealing with 350mg per litre of copper and 375mg per litre of aluminium so almost in effect of the industrial grade solutions but from the waste rock dump near the open cut there you've got all the rubber table completely polluted by the acid mine drainage and the open cut is acting as a sink and so it drills all of that contaminated groundwater in quite remarkable site I've never seen that anywhere else so you go down Hammerhands Creek and follow up the creek system especially all the way down to Surprise Creek and you can still find the wetlands on the coast about in the Queensland side in the Gulf country sitting at about 50mg per litre of copper so still extremely significant copper concentrations despite all that dilution so for a really really small amount of mine waste you've killed an entire river system of Hammerhands Creek and the severe impacts on Surprise Creek so it's quite remarkable that we've been able to achieve that with a mine that only operated for two years. Now if we look at I suppose the more local example for Victoria we've got the La Troie Valley down here and so we've got the three major coal mining and power station complexes so we've got Laurie Ang over on the right hand side here and the more regional view you'll learn up the top here and that's now announced that it will be closing in 2028 a few years earlier than previously expected and Hazelwood a lot of us more affectionately remember it as but we can see the sheer vast area and one of the things to remember is this is about 1.5 seed hubs worth of volume a seed hub is what we often call a volume of Sydney Harbour so Sydney Harbour is approximately 500 million cubic metres and so Hazelwood is 1.5 times that at about 750 million cubic metres and I think from the studies that have been done your lawn is probably sitting somewhere similar to that by the time it finishes and Laurie Ang will be bigger than that. So these are huge features we can't backfill them the more coal has come out volumetrically than the overburden but we need to think about not only just the rehabilitation of Hazelwood but what that means in terms of the whole cumulative rehabilitation of the whole valley and in the La Troie Valley we've only got three major coal mine complexes in places like the Hunter Valley the Bowen Basin and so on you've got dozens upon dozens upon dozens so the complexity there gets much higher and so there's work going on here but the bone at the time this was closed with 70 million dollars and yet the estimated cost was at the very least 750 million so that's showing that our bonds were a significant shortfall compared to what the actual cost is. Now I think NGE I think deserve credit they've certainly been continuing to fund the works there as Alcala are doing down at Anglesey as well so I think it's just because the bond is short doesn't automatically mean it's going to be disaster but there is that risk there and certainly from a community point of view that is something that is of concern and if we look at another story and I think one of the ones that I think if we look at the modern mining era as I mentioned there's very few mines being turned off, rehabilitated and then monitored. So Kingston is one of the very few that does meet that sort of basic criteria and it was identified towards the end of its operations in the 90s as being at a significant risk of acid mine drainage AMD and so they, Placidone the company that operated Kingston for its life invested a lot in research and development around looking at the design of soil covers over the tailings dam so this sort of structure on the bottom here is the old tailings dam it's a standard upstream type structure we can see the waste rock dumps the old pits and some tailings inside the wisers pit as well and so the waste rock dumps around here and along the way here you can see the Copperfield River and so it was rehabilitated in the early 2000s and we can see on the right hand side here this is from the environmental assessment work that was put forward to justify converting the old Kingston mine into a pump hydro basically energy storage scheme and so the unique characteristics of the different depths between the two pits allows the potential for pump hydro and so as part of that there was an assessment of the water quality and the risks of disturbing all of that water and the potential risks around AMD and so on as well and so we can see the pit from the point here this is the point basically we've got the main drainage coming out from the old mine works we're getting up to a thousand milligrams per liter almost for several hundred milligrams per liter of sulphate that's pretty high and so we can see if you're looking at the background you're looking at sort of numbers like somewhere between one to ten milligrams per liter upstream so certainly there's still an AMD problem there it's certainly reducing over time and getting closer to sort of background but it certainly suggests there's still soldiers leaving that site and getting into the Copperfield River and so whether it's a big success story and I suppose the disturbance that's now being undertaken to convert the old mine into a pump hydro storage scheme I guess we'll have to wait and see but it's certainly a very unique site in that way Kingston another site that probably most people have forgotten about and I did have the opportunity to get down there about five or six years ago it's about an hour southeast of Canberra and near not far from Queenby and this is an old mine a small volcanic massive sulphide deposit that was mined for just over 20 years in the 1940s and 1950s but a really tailings dam failure nearly 70 cent polluted water right through to Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra and so they went in and did some remediation work so we can see on the hill just behind here that's the old tailings dam cells there's some areas of bare soil and whether that's salt scarring or something I'm not sure but we can certainly see just acid mine drainage coming out from the tow drain at the right basically CPG deception drain at the tow of the dam here and so if you're looking at the Malungo River in the middle here we can certainly see that there's evidence of A&D coming out of the old underground drainage pipes but the Malungo River certainly doesn't seem to be a heavily impacted river compared to say Hanra Hans Creek so but clearly the remediation works have reduced the amount of acid mine drainage getting out into the site arguably reasonably successful to a point and this is after about 25 years of or not 35 years sorry of rehabilitation so again one of the very very few small examples I guess we've got but again we need to extract away those decades to centuries to really be confident about that but out of all of that what do I think that means I think at the moment there is still no consistency on the way that we can get access to the data and the monitoring of operating mines let alone mine rehabilitation and often once we go into mine rehabilitation there's even less you know justification in some ways that people feel the need to keep reporting but I think in many ways it's actually even more important during rehabilitation so in New South Wales for example companies are required to make their annual environmental management reports public and so that means that all of the statutory conditions around groundwater, surface water, annoyance, biodiversity, dust etc. all of that has to be documented in their annual report and that report made public so at the moment it's New South Wales and South Australia that do that but we don't do that here in Victoria for example alright and so but again we don't have many other systems where we've got databases for climate for water resources whether it be surface water or groundwater we've got databases for mines, I guess the Bureau of Meteorology's website will be working overtime lately basic rainfall data and so on but you can look at it in completely different areas like stock markets and so on but we don't do this for mine rehabilitation and that's something that I think if we did we would have much more confidence in understanding not only how much mine rehabilitation actually does proceed but also how successful it is because if we're thinking about processes whether it be acid mine drainage, erosion, ecosystem reestablishment they may take years to decades or sometimes even centuries to work through and so we're dealing with modern mines that are dealing with billions and billions of tons of mine waste so we're not just dealing with small sites like red bank which is just in some ways a poultry of 2.5 million tons but manning to destroy a river system like Mount Lio or Mount Morgan has but we're dealing with much much larger systems, much much larger mines and so that scale of mine rehab is therefore much much larger but also the community concern is therefore much larger and so that's what drives a lot of community concern around either existing mines or new mines and especially that issue around social licence to operate and you know most communities I've worked with and engaged with if you give them good data to address an issue they'll acknowledge that accordingly but for some people they say well we just don't want mining in this patch it's for vineyards, it's for farming or whatever and that's a choice that's fine and I suppose governments then have to make the choice of whether they approve a mine in that context or not but so I think when we're thinking about it there are many much better ways to be able to look at how we verify the success of mine rehabilitation and I think that hopefully the key point is that well we already have analogues out there, we already have the types of systems that we could use we just need to apply them and link all of the various technologies and monitoring etc together so as an example I just sort of put a few different sort of screen captures here and so what we can see is the Australian Mines Atlas which is a system that GSI Australia run which is being replaced pretty soon and Victoria and Victoria I think has always been a great leader in this space is women's or the water monitoring information system so that's a great database of surface water and groundwater data, we also have visualising Victoria's groundwater that the system developed by FEDGINI to basically facilitate better visualisation of groundwater information and data I think it's a wonderful interface to be able to really explore groundwater and so on and then also the reports and other things behind that so I think it's a fantastic example of what can be done with modern technology and thinking. On the left-hand side here is things like the Queensland Glow where they've used the developed-based interface that allows Queensland to look at a whole range of different aspects and that was developed largely to address community concern around calcium gas and the impacts on groundwater and in some way that would be my argument up there for many years when I was looking at calcium gas issues is that the data was held private, it needs to be made public and so certainly companies like Santos and Origin have now developed their own, like Santos have their own water portal which also does the same kind of thing as these types of systems but again that's fine during operation but we're still not doing it for rehabilitation. Now I guess some of the more recent work that I've been doing to try and get to the numbers behind a lot of this is my own database and my own I suppose dots on the map where there's been a mine where there's a tailing exam or waste rock dump or heat bleach facility and things like that so this is work of literally just about finished now and will be hopefully getting published pretty soon and so that way I have not only just the quantity of tailings but I'll be looking at using this for looking at rehabilitation and potentially isn't worth reprocessing tailings to get residual metals out or critical metals, stuff that's important for modern technology and so on. So eventually this will be public and so on so I suppose if people are interested then stay in touch. So out of all of that it's probably time to finish up now but we need better systems, we need a much more public approach in how we really verify one the extent of mine rehabilitation but also data on which to judge success and I think that principle of transparency is fundamental, community is really expected and that's fair, like I think we've been told for decades that we have mine rehabilitation and it's successful and yes okay there are some examples out there and there's probably more than we realize but there's also a lot of examples out there where rehabilitation hasn't been done or it hasn't been as successful as hoped and there's Ron John rule, there's Mount Todd, there's many others I could name and hence once I've finished my little database work that list will be complete. And a lot of the issues in thinking about how to do that is the standard stuff we've been doing for some decades now in contaminated land assessment, environmental monitoring and so on, chain of custody, the quality control issues like the ownership and management of these systems and again but also looking at how we integrate various aspects in some ways mine rehabilitation is more complex, we're not just dealing about water we're not just dealing about climate, we're looking at all aspects and so again in the GIS architecture that we need and again but this stuff we've already addressed, we already have the various technologies out there and so examples like Winnison, VVG and others already address a lot of this and so I think in a lot of ways we don't see these issues as barriers because we've dealt with these in many of the existing systems we have and so again one of the things that I think we need to work out is how long do we monitor for if you look at the MacArthur River Zinc mine up in the Northern Territory when it went through its most recent environmental impact assessment it said it needs to be monitoring rehabilitation for 1,000 years and that's given that site which is an extremely high risk site in terms of acid mine drainage, the uranium mine for example is required to demonstrate no impacts from solutes from its tailings for 10,000 years and that's an intellectual challenge I guess in groundwater but it's a high bar, it sets an extremely high standard I guess on how we think about rehabilitation there but also the funding systems really need to match that, a lot of the bonds that we have really only deal with the actual engineering works, the rehabilitation works themselves, there's really not as much focus on how we fund long-term monitoring and also if there is something that goes wrong how we fund future remediation efforts or maintenance efforts and that's something I think industry, government and community are all struggling to work at how that needs to look, there's ideas out there but I think we at the moment I certainly don't see any good ideas that are already in place that do that well and even at Ranger we're still struggling on how to actually make that happen so all of that means that we have this great opportunity because I don't see anywhere else in the world that's really doing this yet either so I think Australia we could really develop this approach and really make sure we're demonstrating not only that we are doing mine rehabilitation but that we're having good success and then that will also have great value for communities but also for the industry and government in terms of understanding the reliability and making sure that we are not leaving problems for future generations but that communities can say well actually okay we can now believe these claims, there's good evidence for it, there's good monitoring data, we are having good success and so that will help reinforce I suppose a social license to operate and have great value that way. That alone I guess the other sort of imperative of actually doing a good job in the first place so yeah that's it for now, I'm happy to open it up for questions so just contact details and sorry but again thanks to Richard and Michelle and again let's get stuck into Q&A Thanks very much David for that just before we hand over to Michelle I'd like to say that it's always impressive having someone who's devoted their whole career to a particular sector and I thought the depth of knowledge around this topic was excellent so over to you Michelle to run the Q&A please remember to log your questions into that Q&A box and over to you Michelle, thanks. Thank you Richard, thank you Gavin, we have two questions at the moment let's start with the first one, how do you think we can make rehabilitation reporting more streamlined when there are many organizations and regulators involved? Yeah that's a good question, I'll give some thoughts and I know Richard will have some extra thoughts there as well but in some ways it's doing what we already do there's a lot of requirements for a line that's undergoing rehabilitation to monitor and assess for biodiversity whether that be vegetation structure, erosion or surface water monitoring, groundwater monitoring so a lot of that data exists and I think part of the problem is that it's not being made public now sometimes it's a very simple thing, the reports are prepared so just making those reports available on a website that can do one way to do it another way to do it is to look at the databases there and looking at the ways to make that available now given the nature of things there's great value of thinking making those databases public, now I understand there's I suppose sensitivity around that and sometimes a lot of commercial knowledge and costs associated with that but hopefully I think I've made the case that there's also a lot of great value both scientific value as well as community value and regulatory value in making that public and I suppose that's one of the questions that I think we need to work through is should that database be run by a government regulator or department or should it be run by the mining company itself so there are certainly examples in New Zealand like the old Golden Cross mine where the neighbouring Whiteie mine manages that and so all of the monitoring data around the rehabilitation of Golden Cross is basically managed by another mining company on behalf of the provincial government there around Waikato so there are different examples around the world but I think I hand over to Richard for some extra thoughts as well what he thought is that the question was around streamlining reporting I think often we focus on environmental compliance metrics you know concentrations of elements etc and we disregard the performance of the structures that we've designed to minimise the risk of the impacts on the environment so I think as an industry it would be good for us to start focusing in on the performance of the actual structures and whether it's you know pumping or covers a whole lot of things to which actually are the main mechanism that's been chosen to protect the environment they can have triggers on them so the action on that often environmental monitoring is periodic based on lab analysis whereas you can have continuous monitoring on built structures to really alert you very quickly to a failure in a whole range of different engineered structures so I'd like to see more thought into compliance around the performance of the sort of mitigation measures rather than so much on the environment itself. Just another final thought on the aspect of streamlining I think it's probably a good way to think about that yes there is a bit of effort in translating or getting it from internally inside a company to that public system whatever that system becomes but I think the other way to think about that is there's a lot of reward for that as well and not just to the company but to the regulator to the community as well as to the broader body of science to really assess my rehab so I think and I guess to me I've got an open mind at the moment as to exactly how we both type of systems and how we start to do that but I think we do need to be efficient but I think we shouldn't be afraid of actually taking an extra 3% or 5% on someone's workload and we need to work out how to sort of resource that without actually thinking about actually the value that we're creating from that extra effort and so I think yeah hopefully that helps and hopefully that answers the question. Thank you. Let's go to the second question. Does mudmiga database include legacy mine site or just operating mines? Does it also include queries? Okay great question. It includes some old mines but most of the mines I've put on my map over the last 50 odd years. Now some mines you know Broken Hill and Matlow Island and others of course you know long predate that and they're there of course but not for a lot of what I've got there is the fields right so I've got Bendigo Goldfield rather than all of the individual mines that used to exist on the old Bendigo Goldfield right so and I think to verify that I think it's beyond you know what anyone's really capable of at the moment. I don't know if they're ever capable of doing that so we know that there used to be dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of mines specifically around Bendigo itself but so validating all of that I think would be yeah it would be tricky but certainly for queries at the moment I don't that's something I've got other work at progress at the moment where I'm looking at some queries again with a few different communities and so queries is an area that it's underestimated and I think there's certainly you know I think there's the typical view that queries are really low risk they're just hard rock only and so you don't have the sort of acid migraineage risks or chemical risks like cyanide or mercury or arsenic and so on but if you've got a limestone query you can have very significant impacts on groundwater if you've got a same query same sort of thing if you've got a hard rock query you're probably more worried about dust, noise and blasting and so rather than sort of groundwater issues with queries of course they're often very close to communities or very close to houses and so how we manage all of that is really critical but queries I think because they're often considered the distant poor cousin of mining they often get a lot less attention but that is certainly something I'd like to do and it's something I've certainly got some work in progress at the moment just looking at Victoria but again there's no real consistency on how you classify queries nationally and so trying to come up with a nationally consistent database on that would require a lot of effort but that's certainly a great idea and there's certainly a great need for that as well but hopefully that answers the question Thank you, Zihan Wang say hi Gavin, great talk Thanks again Next one, I'm sorry if I pronounced this wrong Shiran Jit Kumar Saka I'm a PhD student at RMIT University I have recently started my PhD study and working on a PhD research project jointly funded by RMIT and CSRO I am working on a tailing storage facilities management in Australia and I will evaluate technical economic facility of recovering critical minerals from old tailings I am wondering if there is any database for tailing storage facilities in Australia The simple answer is mine, no one else has done it I think so yes there is, it's my own that's what I'm sort of working on just chasing down a few loose ends at the moment and then I'll be able to write it up and submit that and that's certainly the work that will be collaborating on with Geoscience Australia because at the moment I've got the sort of the tons that are there and sort of the grades you could expect roughly for the primary metals and I guess we're all interested in to work out what else might be present within those tailings and that requires a lot more geochemical work and I guess that's the next big phase of that sort of research is to take that into that space but yeah dropping in line, well I'm happy to collaborate and help out Thank you, next one, Mike Limpos What are the metrics you would use to demonstrate rehabilitation success? I think a lot of those are sort of the categories I would sort of talking through like surface water quality, the standards for surface water quality the ANZEC guidelines, we can use those for groundwater in various ways too, allowing for I suppose the use categories that we have for groundwater and again that will vary depending on what stage you're in but in the same sense that we look at metrics for biodiversity, a really good example for the biodiversity metrics would be the Darling Range in Western Australia where they've been mining bauxite I suppose since the 1960s and so Alcoa there especially has been very careful to measure the biodiversity metrics and look at the species composition and the vegetation structure before mining, they then mine for the bauxite and then reestablish an ecosystem there and then they reckon it takes about 5 to 10 years to get back to a lot of those same metrics and so they can show that you're achieving those same biodiversity metrics within about 5 to 10 years. Now one of the subtle details in that of course is trees that are say 500 years old or you can't achieve that obviously within 5 to 10 years of rehabilitation so there's certainly some aspects of some metrics that you could consider that just can't be captured and there is that long term impact there right so a lot of those and depending on the mine and the context, the Darling Range of course has had to deal with cinnamon fungus, if I talk through a cinemony and so that's been a big issue during operations so we've got specific criteria there but then also you've got other areas if you're looking at the Goldfields in Western Australia you're in a hyper-arid climate and so the criteria might be very different, not so much surface water as you might be about groundwater or vegetation structure I think that's why I always keep that fairly open because the exact metrics will vary but the basic ideas I think are there. Now if you look at another example which I didn't have time to go through today would be Table Top which is an old gold mine that operated in the 80s and 90s up near Croydon which is a part of Queensland but it's not far away from Normanton I guess and Carumba in Queensland and near the Gulf Country and so that mine was closed in the 90s, mid 90s and you come back now and there's no visual indicators of acid mine drainage and yet the pH is 3.5 in the palm of draining the open cuts or one of the open cuts I should and so there's clearly a risk there that was underestimated at the time of rehabilitation so I think when we're looking at these things there's lots of metrics that we can think about and a lot of them will vary according to the mine and the type of deposit that it is, how it was mined and managed and so on. There's lots of potential metrics out there and again some of these are included into regulatory criteria but then there's I think when we think about the community perspective on a lot of these things is well actually they tend to keep it pretty simple they don't have to be safe. They don't want to have to constantly worry about it and so on or if there is a need to constantly monitor and maintain the site then that needs to be addressed and we need to work out how to fund and resource that and so that's achieved and we can maintain site safety and so on and so that's something that I think we're still and depending on the nature of the site it will depend on the extent to which we need to do that but there are certainly some sites like MacArthur River or Ranger where you really do need to think very hard about how we do that. Yeah hopefully that helps. Gavin if I could just add to that. One of the pieces of the puzzle that is missing in a lot of sites is often a lot of detailed analysis done at sort of the environmental impact start of a mine but then the matching up of that against the actual environmental monitoring plan and more importantly the reporting site against that is often where there's more thought required and I think that's one area where technology is now enabled us to be able to do a lot more analysis so to get specific for example on a project we're designing at the moment we've been asked to look at sort of catchment health indicators which rely on a whole bunch of different parameters to be measured and go through various algorithms to come up with that health ranking but that can then be visualised spatially as well so there is an opportunity to improve and create simplified indicators of success of rehabilitation where obviously the devil is in the detail that sits under that but I think at the moment a lot of the work I see around mining we have a lot of monitoring going on but often the reporting is perhaps more complex than it needs to be and there needs to be more thought in how it is simplified to those metrics that are really important to community I have to remind you of a point I often make as well actually is that we do rarely ever actually check how accurate our prediction of impacts were from the environmental impact statement and a really good example of that is Mount Todd and Mount Todd went bankrupt twice with Bound and has got a pit lake with 13 gigalitres of ph2 water so it's been a disaster in terms of mine rehab but at the time the project was approved in the 1990s one of the really heartfelt concerns was the risks to the Gouldian Finch now this is up near Catherine in the Northern Territory and so the Gouldian Finch is an ancient bird it's a beautiful coloured little bird and yet about 15 years after mine had gone bankrupt twice there was one of the local bird societies amateur scientists I guess citizen science actually did a survey of all the Gouldian Finchers in the area near the old Mount Todd mine and they were able to show that they are actually much better health and there was prior to the mine starting so concerns around the mine potentially leading to the extinction of the Gouldian Finch have proven to be wrong or unfounded and so now there's other problems with Mount Todd that were completely underestimated i.e. acid mine drainage so I think linking that back in I think is also another really important part of the overall process when we're thinking about not only just mine operations but especially when we're thinking about mine rehabilitation because taking mine rehabilitation back to where it started from i.e. before the mine was there if we can do that I think that's often a really good way that we can approach it scientifically but it's also often the way communities approach it as well. I think you guys we have only five more minutes to answer nine questions now if we cannot answer your questions probably Gavin and Richard we'll reach you and clarify the question for you okay next one Zeyham Wang is successful mine rehab an essential part of improve safety given BHP is facing a potential nine billion bill for San Marco Dam disaster. There's no aspect of mine rehab that often doesn't get a lot of exposure I guess or thought but we have to monitor these structures in perpetuity effectively because unless we're proposing to dig up the tailings and put it back into the pit where we don't have any physical structure to monitor and that does happen it's planned to happen but the river it's being done at ranger and woodcutters and a bunch of other mines but we don't know how to really do that yet I think or we're not doing it well yet I guess and certainly Brumadinho is an example of that where that tailings dam had already been stopped being used and it was in the process of waiting to be decommissioned and they knew that Brumadinho was metastable but they ignored the warning signs and assumed that they would eventually get around to mediating a dam and removing them, reprocessing the tailings and then put it into a new dam which was more stable unfortunately I suppose history got to then first but I think it's a big question that how we factor in the monitoring of that I think some of the simple ideas that engineers I know in various mining companies we can sit down and go let's put a hundred million dollars aside at one percent interest rate you put one million dollars a year for monitoring now we can talk to you about whether you need one million dollars or whether it has to be a hundred million or 50 million and whether you assume a higher interest rate and all of those sorts of numbers but the basic principle is let's put aside a pot of cash that's held in some kind of bond and so on and you move off the interest and so that way the interest is what's always paying for that monitoring and then even now then if you've got floods that we're seeing now in eastern Australia if you've got a really big event that goes through that means you need to go and do some maintenance works you've got a bit of extra cash there to be able to use that for as well so I think there's potential ideas there and certainly the engineers that I know that their job was to stop failures like Samarko or Brumadinho and they worked they didn't work to BHP I should say but we could sit down and agree that we will need some kind of process like that we will need some kind of system that deals with the long term integrity of tailing stands but regulators and companies don't want to go there yet now maybe in the post Samarko post Brumadinho well yeah maybe we finally will get there but from what I'm seeing out there in the trailing space we've got a journey that we're still on and I think we'll be able to go over do you have any extra thoughts on that Richard? I've got some examples out there where pooled funds are used you know in the contaminated site area the super fund in the US is one that might be looking at I do think it's about pooling resources that's a bit like an insurance concept in a way and it's important to have that as a secondary thing to an estimate of one value required at the individual mine because we don't seem to be getting that right at the moment based on what you've sort of put forward you know like that 10% around Hazelwood for example so pooled resources and sharing the risk to allow this one to make sense. Hi thank you next one is Steve Cody I have seen several mines that are parked not operating and not rehab it is an economic to operate and cheaper to maintain the license how best are the risks etc manage in these circumstances? The care and maintenance phase is a big issue and I think typically what we see out there is that mines do get closed and converted to care and maintenance because there's a hope that the mine may be able to reopen at some point in the future if there's better prices or more exploration extends the old deposit or whatever it happens to be and at some point and I think this is the point the Northern Territory got to with Red Bank is there been 20 years of hope for Red Bank reopening so 20 years of pollution and so eventually the Northern Territory Government said we're cancelling the lease and calling it in and it's now treated as an abandoned mine and the mining legacy fund that they have in the Northern Territory so it gets a sort of kind of fund that Richard was talking about as well like essentially pool fund like a 1% levy on mines in the Northern Territory to help fund this clean up and remediation of abandoned mines like Red Bank and that's good policy. I remember thinking the senior regulator that helped implement that up in Darwin and a fellow by the name of Russell Ball it was almost better for getting that policy up so I think at some point we need to make decisions about how important rehabilitation is to proceed now as the hope that a mine may eventually reopen and that the ability to make that decision I think shouldn't just be made on the fact that we're always going to hope that a mine can reopen because sometimes they never do. Mount Morgan has been closed for over 30 years and it's still never reopened again and so Mount Lyle has been closed for several years and it may or may not open again and so I think you could go through. I think that the way that we use care and maintenance to delay rehabilitation funding I think we need to be very careful about that. There's certainly good examples where companies have not been able to sell like Goldworthy in Western Australia where BHP was not allowed to sell and then they had to go and spend the money on rehabilitation and then actually fix that site like they promised they were going to do and were legally required to do rather than selling it onto a junior company. That's something that I think from a public policy point of view we really do need to think hard about but at the moment there is too much emphasis I think on actually well put the mine can reopen. Now sometimes you have a context where the risks are low and not necessarily a bad outcome but that can still be a good outcome and not a high risk outcome in terms of environmental problems but you can get site for a red bank where that care and maintenance phase and the mine's closed and there is an eventual hope that it might reopen but I think we need to be I suppose a lot more hard-nosed about that and if we do rehabilitation and then there's more all discovered later and that makes it more expensive to open an uneconomic then it's uneconomic a better future or better market or something else but I would like to acknowledge the work of Mia Pepperon in that space she's actually done some recent research looking at the whole process of care and maintenance versus rehabilitation in Western Australia so if people are interested I can certainly send through her master's thesis on that I think that helps. Thank you Gavine Richard do you have five more minutes to a few questions we still have seven Yeah I think we could probably give five more minutes Sure. Okay so Yeah cool thank you. The next one is related to the previous Keith Osborne. Given the failure of bonds to cover the long-term issues could there be a mining levy that goes into a centralized funding body like US Superfund to underpin long-term funding for abundant mine rehab? I think we should look at something like that now Western Australia is kind of going down that model to an extent where they have a one big central fund that all bonds get paid into and then about the problem at the moment with Western Australia is you only pay an annual fee right you don't pay a significant fraction of the total cost whether that be 50% or even 100% of the total estimated cost of rehabilitation and then the company is legally expected to complete the works and is liable for it and so and then when they've done that they can apply to get a refund back from the central fund. So I think it's sort of partially on that model but it doesn't deal with this issue of long-term monitoring so we know we can do it and as Richard said there's the Superfund example the Northern Territory has the mining legacy fund which is a 1% levy on existing mines in the Northern Territory to help fund the remediation of abandoned mines and as part of that there is I suppose a basis on which they can use some of that money for long-term monitoring as well but we need a higher level approach and I think one of the things that I've made the point many times I guess that if we did that in Australia let's say we've got 0.01% of mining revenue in Australia that's the levy we put on that and I think before I get my maths correct we'd probably be looking at something of $100 million alone in one year just from that levy that we would have and so there are ideas out there there are ways we can do that I guess this is part of the conversation that we need to have to work out what is the best way to do that and understand that there is a cost but there's also great benefit both scientifically as well as with social licence to operate as well as actually making sure that we address the real liability so I think there's a war for effort ratio there I certainly believe is strong but we need to work out how to make sure that the arrangements are equitable for all concerned. Richard any extra thoughts No I think you've covered that one you've got six questions to go Speed answers, let's go for it No Michelle may have dropped off I'm sorry I'm back here Governmental organisation database only cut for the data that the particular organisation is responsible for How do you make one point of truth for all water related data when more than one organisation regulator are collecting or responsible Look I think there's plenty of examples where that has worked successfully and I think one of the ones is where Gavin put up about the Surat Basin around Tulsa and gas monitoring and it's one that Hydrotera is involved in, there's multiple parties collecting that data in a continuous way and it's all going back to a centralised repository which is independently run The key to this is provenance of data and mapping that through and that's something that I spend way too much time on my life doing which is you really need to be able to look at integrity of data that's produced and that means you need to have integrity of the methods that sit behind that and then you need to have ways of ensuring and proving that that is actually the way you collect your data and the best way to do that is to systemise that it doesn't mean it's all automated but it means that the processes that are used to collect that data are consistent and you have lines of evidence to show that it's been proven Now most of the industry operates in that way at the moment but the Office of Groundwater Impact Assessment processes up there in Queensland were successful and it really did lever off having automation of bringing that data feed back into that centralised database and approval of the methods behind which that data is collected. I think this is an area that industry really does need to focus on. There is a gap in QAQC integrity say between laboratory analysis versus sensor based collection and there's differences in the quality of that data. So the accuracy for example but that needs to be balanced against the variability that comes from dynamic systems too so lab analysis is only accurate to the data it's collected where sensor data picks up the dynamic characteristics. So there's a lot of thought required in that but I think the answer to the question is really there needs to be agreement on methodologies and there needs to be agreement on data analysis, processes post-measurement and both are equally important so that would raise industry standards around that is what. Absolutely which I think we already do pretty much that for contaminated site staff and all of the statutory monitoring anyway so I think a lot of that is just basically using the same methods that we already have but again just making sure they're included in the way that we do this for mine rehabilitation. Absolutely. In the meantime I've just been typing a few sort of short answers to some of these sort of questions there so hopefully that helps with some of the other questions but Michelle Yes okay next one, Tom Breed from Ring Your Mind Do you have any good white papers on placing geotextile quite usually through several meters of water and incurring to a pit wall also stitching geotextile on water, our pit through water is page three Yeah that's a really difficult context and I think there are examples out there, sometimes you do hit through the real limits of some of this sort of stuff. Examples in Germany there's Ranger, I think a lot of the work they've done is putting waste rock over the top first so you get the loading to basically compact the surface down and make it more stable to be able to start traffic on. So I think yeah email me I've just typed that into the response now so if you email me I can provide some more papers either on the experience at Ranger and also the experience elsewhere around Germany and so on or at least point to where fine literature and it may or may not be exactly that specific to help but hopefully it gets you a long way. Thank you Julie Board also thank you for answering Michael's query, it's related. Any other suggestion for measuring success of a rehab that waste rocked them Dump sorry. Yeah I think I'd briefly sort of say I'd refer back to sort of what I was explaining earlier I think a lot of them exactly the same. We're looking at the ecological structure on a waste rock dump you know we see bucket as an old tailing stand at Molden in Central Victoria which is a tailing stand on a waste rock dump but it had been there for probably a century now and it's all fully rehabilitated or revegetated I should say at least visually to a standard that looks pretty similar to the surrounding bush and so and when that was proposed for processing back in the 90s the local community said no and so the company had to abandon that project and so I think a lot of the common ways we would think about it are exactly the way a lot of communities approach it as well. There are metrics we can look at for the revegetation and the structure so then there's also physical stability, are there risks of acid mine drainage or not and so a lot of that I think there are all the various metrics we look at the actual criteria you might set for judging success may vary. If you're looking at the coal mines especially the Anglesey coal mine which is nearing the end of its rehabilitation now I understand the criteria they use there would probably be quite different to the criteria in the La Trobe Valley Anglesey they're probably looking at heat land re-establishment as part of the ecological values next to the Great Ocean Road the beaches and stuff there versus the La Trobe Valley where you might quite happily allow grazing so all of that would be very scientific. Thank you. Last one from Joe Olden-Prentz Do you anticipate any PFAS monitoring requirements in and around these mines? Thanks for asking that Joe. What would they find who knows it's something that I think it's a big Pandora's box at the moment that I don't think we know what the size of that is but there's some sites where you wouldn't expect to find PFAS and there's probably others where you might find it without expecting to find it and there's probably some where you will find it when you actually do expect to find it as well so I think you'll probably see that full range there but yeah I think that the main PFAS focus at the moment is on ports and firefighting facilities and landfills and so on but it's something that I think people have thought about from the mines but haven't seen much on that yet but it's probably something that we do need to think about but beyond that I think it's a great question and doesn't really have a great answer at the moment except to say that yes it's something that we need to look at That's all questions for now. I will take the time to say thank you to Gavin and Richard for the time to present this webinar really informative so anything else you add Gavin and Richard? Thank you for the opportunity and I hope it's been really useful for people to think about these types of ideas and technologies and the targets that we need to and the systems we need to think about to achieve good mine rehabilitation success and I'd probably like to say thank you very much Gavin the other thing I'd say is that one of the key messages Gavin was hoping to get through today was that technology is not the limiter on how we manage these sites these days it's more the adoption of that technology to coming up with better ways and hopefully today which was our first one of this style of webinar to promote that sort of thinking I hope that's been a value to everyone and thank you very much we had lots of participants today and I think that's reflective of Gavin's knowledge and value but thank you very much for your time No pleasure Thank you everyone see you in the next webinar See you later folks