BHP’s Ashara Moore claimed the Excellence in Mining award, sponsored by Weir minerals, at the 2023 Women in Industry Awards. She shares her journey from a young woman against mining to a PhD student researching sustainable solutions for tailings waste.
When she first stepped onto a mine site, it was the management of tailings that left a lasting impression on Ashara Moore.
She was told that, generally speaking, tailings waste is stored in large dams over time, and that was that.
Ashara says she remembers, as an undergraduate student, thinking that this couldn’t be the only way. But her time constructing tailings facilities in the years that followed across numerous mine sites Australia-wide, reaffirmed that it was the norm.
It was through talks about her experience with her now supervisor at Queensland University of Technology, alongside an interest in her team’s work in the High Purity Alumina (HPA) space, that she landed on a topic for her PhD.
A year and a half into her study, Ashara aims to invent a soil amelioration technique using enhanced weathering and other soil amendments to stabilise acidic soils, sequester carbon dioxide, and provide material that is suitable for rehabilitation purpose.
If successful, Ashara will be providing a new type of carbon reduction technology (CRT) that could positively impact mining’s green-house gas emission targets. It would also provide a more sustainable solution to the management of mineral processing tailings.
It’s a big turnaround for someone who once brazenly admitted during a work experience interview with Rio Tinto that she was morally opposed to mining.
To her surprise she got the gig and within a few months found herself onsite at Kestrel Coal Mine in Emerald, Queensland.
“It was a turning point for me,” Ashara says. “I had a unique opportunity that many aren’t afforded; the opportunity to be exposed, utterly, to the mining industry. It was there that I began to understand that a world without mining is a world that is unable to obtain critical resources, and a world without critical resources means a world without renewable energy, innovative technology, and improved standards of living.
“I was directly exposed to the legislation and policy that governs the sector, and the growing push toward better environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes. It not only made me appreciate that this was an industry trying to do and be better, but it was a sector that I thought I could make a positive difference within.
“Luckily, my pre-conceived ideas at the time did not preclude me from a commencing a worthwhile and rewarding career.”
The processing required to extract most ore types often result in hazardous, acidic waste. This is particularly harmful if released inadvertently to the environment. Ashara’s interested in how the various elements in that waste can interact with the surrounding soils and groundwaters.
“I am not of the opinion that mining can simply cease – how else could we possible retrieve the critical minerals needed for renewable technology and all the other magnificent things that we rely on in our daily lives,” she says “I am pro finding solutions to ensuring that our sector can peacefully co-exist with our environment. Tailings management (currently) is the avenue in which I wish to play my part in this venture.”
Currently, a tailings storage facility (TSF) is the primary method of waste management within the mining industry. The most common and well-known is tailings dams.
Ashara says storage in such facilities generally involves deposit of tailings slurries, which are transported post-processing (to separate ore) from preparation plants into large dams purpose-built to store waste material. Over time, they are filled, decommissioned, and then rehabilitated.
The driving consideration behind tailings dam designs is that they are to be designed in perpetuity – to remain for life without human interference. This essentially means that waste material is stored for the foreseeable future; it is not remediated.
Ashara hopes that the resources sector will find new ways to extract critical minerals, while ensuring the planet’s longevity for future generations.
“My PhD study is just one very small, very niche segue toward achieving that goal,” she says. “By targeting mining waste, one of the most substantial potential environmental impactors within industry, and hopefully finding more sustainable and responsible ways of managing this waste, I hope to contribute to the ESG agenda gaining momentum in the sector.
“In doing so, I am hoping to achieve a new ‘normal’ about the way we think about tailings waste. I hope that in future conversations for businesses, we are considering remediation as a potential waste management tool, rather than storage.”
She says the greatest barriers to her work are commercial viability– it would be fantastic to land on a solution for remediating tailings waste, but it will hold little value in industry if it can’t be made economically advantageous to businesses – and the inadvertent carbon output of her work.
“As with the universe, it’s all a balancing act to reach equilibrium.”
Ashara is starting laboratory work to understand the tailings waste she’s focusing on during her study and assessing its potential impact on the environment if stored using contemporary methods.
In August she presented her preliminary findings to the World Chemistry Conference in the Hague, Netherlands.
Nominations for the 2024 Women in Industry Awards are now open.
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