Site hydrology and tailings water balance for mining operations
Environmental compliance monitoring via satellite change detection, tailings dam water-balance and breach analysis, and site hydrology studies that support permitting and closure planning.
Water is a permitting constraint, an operational risk and a closure liability across the whole life of a mine. A tailings facility in particular has to be shown to manage its water balance under conditions well outside anything the site has yet experienced, and the consequences of getting that wrong are not commercial but catastrophic.
We provide site hydrology studies, tailings water-balance and breach analysis, and satellite-based environmental change monitoring for mining operations. The monitoring work is equally useful to operators demonstrating compliance and to regulators verifying it — we do the same analysis either way.
What makes this sector different
- Tailings water balance must hold under extreme events with no site precedent.
- Environmental compliance must be demonstrated over areas too large to inspect on the ground.
- Closure planning requires hydrological projections decades past the operating life.
- Catchments are altered by the operation itself, so pre-mining baselines stop applying.
What we deliver
- Site water-balance model under operating and extreme rainfall scenarios
- Tailings dam breach analysis with downstream inundation mapping
- Satellite change detection for disturbance footprint and rehabilitation progress
- Closure-phase hydrological assessment for permitting and provisioning
Common questions from mining companies
Can satellite monitoring demonstrate rehabilitation progress?
Yes. Vegetation indices tracked over a time series show recovery quantitatively rather than through comparative site photographs, and because the imagery archive is historical the same method reconstructs the pre-disturbance baseline the recovery is measured against.
What does a tailings breach analysis involve?
Routing a hypothetical breach outflow through the downstream terrain to produce inundation extent, depth and arrival times. The breach parameters are assumptions, so the analysis is run across a range rather than a single case — a plan built on one optimistic assumption is not a plan.