The Mining Industry: Companies, Careers and Methods

The life of a mine, from first look to closure

Most of what happens in the mining industry makes sense once you see how long a single project takes. A typical path runs through seven stages, and a project can stall or die at any of them:

1. Exploration: mapping, sampling, geophysics and drilling to find mineralization.
2. Resource definition: enough drilling to estimate tonnes and grade under a reporting code such as JORC or NI 43-101.
3. Studies: scoping, prefeasibility and feasibility studies that test whether the deposit can be mined at a profit.
4. Permitting and financing: environmental approvals, land access, community agreements and the money to build.
5. Construction of the mine, plant, power, water and roads.
6. Production, often for decades.
7. Closure and reclamation, which the operator has to plan and usually fund up front.

Going from discovery to first production commonly takes more than ten years. That long lead time is one reason metal prices can stay high for years after demand rises: new supply simply can’t arrive quickly.

Who works in the mining industry

A mining industry analysis usually splits companies by size and stage. Diversified majors such as BHP and Rio Tinto run many mines across several commodities. Mid-tier producers run a handful. Junior companies explore and develop, funded mainly by selling shares. State-owned companies, such as Chile’s Codelco, are major producers in some countries. Royalty and streaming firms fund projects in exchange for a slice of future output. The split matters because each group earns money differently: a major lives on production and cost control, while a junior lives on drill results and its next capital raise.

Around them sits a large services sector: drilling contractors, engineering firms, equipment makers, laboratories, consultants and software providers. In Australia this group is often called METS (mining equipment, technology and services). Many of the people who work in mining are employed by these suppliers and never by a miner directly. Our pieces on mining industry trends and how mining assets are valued cover the business side in more depth.

Surface, strip and underground mining

The mining method follows the shape and depth of the deposit. Open-pit mining digs a stepped pit to reach a large, fairly shallow orebody, typical for copper, gold and iron ore. Strip mining removes the overburden in long parallel cuts to expose a flat-lying seam, mostly coal and some phosphate, and contour mining follows a seam around a hillside. Placer mining recovers gold or tin from loose river gravels. Underground mining uses shafts, declines and tunnels when the ore is too deep or too narrow to reach from the surface.

Pros and cons of strip mining

Strip mining recovers a very high share of a shallow seam, is cheaper per tonne than underground mining and is generally safer for workers, since there is no roof to collapse. The downside is that it removes everything above the seam across the whole area mined, so soils, vegetation and drainage are disturbed on a large scale. In the US, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires coal operators to restore land after mining and to post a bond that covers the cost. Our guides to the surface mining process and to contour strip mining go through each method step by step.

Which mining deposits are most profitable?

No single metal or deposit type is always the most profitable. Profit depends on a handful of factors that geologists and engineers weigh together:

A modest-grade deposit near a railway can beat a high-grade one in a remote mountain range. Projects test all of this in a financial model; our walkthrough of a mining financial model in Excel shows how the inputs fit together.

Technology in mining today

On producing mines, the biggest changes are autonomous haul trucks and drills, remote operating centers, and sensors that track equipment health and ore quality as it moves. Our guide to autonomous mining equipment explains how these systems work on site.

In exploration, the change is in how fast a large license can be narrowed down before anyone drills. Our satellite mineral detection service combines eight families of satellite data, including optical, shortwave-infrared, radar, thermal, terrain and magnetic data, to rank Exploration Targets across a license. It sits ahead of a JORC or NI 43-101 resource estimate, never in place of one, and helps field teams decide where to sample and drill first.