Techno-Economic Aspect of Dimension Stone Mining In Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Abstract

In developing countries like Pakistan which are bestowed by nature with huge deposits of minerals arelargely run by small scale mining, and mostly result in wasting precious deposits by adopting conventional miningmethods neglecting the health and safety aspect. This research endeavour analyzed the techno-economic aspects ofvarious mining methods for extraction of dimension stone in chitral region and proposed a suitable mining methodbased on these aspects. Seven different deposits of dimension stone were taken as case studies to evaluate the proposedapproach. For each deposit, twelve criteria were compared as per the procedure of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP).These aspects are quality, quantity, mining cost, infrastructure, mining and processing losses, mining time, equipment’sperformance, skilled labour, work capacity to fragment the deposits, benching and safety. Whereas, the alternatives aremechanized mining, material expansion/controlled blasting and conventional mining. The criteria were compared andmethods suitable for each deposit were suggested.