Mining and other operations seek to invest their capital where it will make a difference, where it will bring most value. For large resource extraction and transformation companies, this often implies to choose between expanding the mine, upgrading the process plant or material handling facilities or transport systems, or investing at port. A thorough assessment of the entire value chain is required to determine where the bottlenecks are and where investments will actually bring the desired results. In this presentation, we will look at a few case studies where a value chain capacity analysis was conducted with the support of dynamic simulation and share some resulting insights. These were used for debottlenecking the value chain and establishing through scenario analysis where and in what order capital should be spent in order to achieve target capacity while minimizing capital investment.
