https://www.mining-technology.com/
The Swedish town of Kiruna is sinking into the caverns excavated by more than half a century of iron ore mining in the region. In response, local officials and the state-owned miner responsible for the mining work are committing over a billion dollars to relocate much of the town three kilometres to the east, trying to transplant the spirit of Kiruna to a new, safer, location. JP Casey takes a look at how you can move a village, to save a mine.
Swedish state-owned miner Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB) has enjoyed a profitable and productive few years, with end-of-year profits rising from $512.9m in 2017 to $563.2m in 2018, and total iron ore production climbing from 25.7 million tonnes (Mt) in 2014 to 26.9Mt half a decade later.
However, LKAB faces a unique challenge. Much of the company’s ore is produced at a mine beneath the remote Swedish town of Kiruna, one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, which is considered to have one of the largest and purest deposits of iron ore in the world.
For more than half a century, projects to extract and process the 1.8bnt of ore in the region have led to significant economic development in the region, but also threatened the town that has prospered from the resource, with Kiruna now at risk of sinking into the gaps in the ground opened up by mining.
LKAB’s solution is as ambitious as it is innovative, as the miner aims to relocate much of the town three kilometres to the east. The company will construct some new buildings from scratch to develop a new, modern city centre for Kiruna, and disassemble and relocate other buildings of historical significance, as part of a vast urban relocation project that will cost over a billion dollars.
For the rest of this article: https://www.mining-technology.com/features/moving-a-town-to-save-a-mine-the-story-of-kiruna/