GSE/NAIT: Dr. Gord McKenna - Landform Design for Sustainable Mining

Landform Design for Sustainable Mining

Agenda:

12:15pm: Registration / Lunch

12:45pm: Presentation

NOTE: There will be $5 added to the price at the door for attendees that don't pre-register.

Abstract

Landform design is an emerging process used to successfully reconstruct mine land. It allows industry, regulators, and communities to work together to manage costs and risks, minimize liability, and produce progressively reclaimed landscapes with confidence and pride. It builds on hundreds of years of geological and ecological literature and fifty years of mine reclamation. It allows landform design teams to apply this vast body of knowledge to build and reclaim mining landforms. Done well, landform design leads to a positive mining legacy — it is a pillar of sustainable mining.

The Landform Design Institute is a new non-profit organization dedicated to creating and supporting a community of landform design practitioners. Its intention is to help their teams design and build truly sustainable mining landscapes. Its focus is on “how to” design and build landforms that are easy to reclaim and will reliably meet the goals and objectives. Its mission is to make landform design routine in the mining industry worldwide by 2030.The talk will focus on the practical “how to” of landform design, introducing the audience to this approach which involves setting clear design goals, objectives, and criteria, performing site investigations, completing the various stages of design, developing contingencies in case performance fails to meet predictions, and integrating a monitoring and maintenance plan as part of effective adaptive management. Many in the audience will recognize this as an extension of Peck’s geotechnical observational method applied to the multi-disciplinary and multi-decadal approach to building mining landforms, landscapes, and regions. Examples from coal, oil sands, metal mines, and a heavy-civil project will illustrate this new process.

Dr. Gord McKenna, P.Eng., P.Geol. is a geotechnical engineer and geologist who builds mining landforms and watersheds. He brings 32 years experience in the mining industry in mine operations and consulting for oil sands, coal, and metal mines.

Gord founded McKenna Geotechnical in 2017 to allow him to bring his landform design experience to a broader audience and to provide independent geotechnical advice on geotechnical review boards, panels, and for First Nations. He is also an adjunct professor of civil engineering at the University of Alberta.

He and his teams have designed and built 20 reclaimed watersheds that cover 40 square kilometers and contain about 30 wetlands and 90 kilometers of streams. He has been a lead contributor to several manuals involving landform design, mine reclamation, and tailings, and has co-authored over 90 technical papers.

Gord’s specialties include mining geotechnique, soft tailings, landform design, and closure planning. He has a bachelor’s degree in Geological Engineering from University of British Columbia and a PhD in Geotechnical Engineering from the University of Alberta. Gord is also a pilot, writer, and photographer.