Water Accounting Framework: from whiteboard plan to world standard
In mining, water is a shared natural resource, and a valuable asset that demands responsible stewardship.
Companies need a way to compare the water balance of mines in a clear, consistent and precise way, year to year, but reporting methods have not always been consistent – either internally or externally – and have been difficult for non-mining-experts to understand.
But an idea on a whiteboard changed all that.
The team at the Sustainable Minerals Institute’s Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry (CWiMI), in conjunction with the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), developed a rigorous yet simple method to account for water in mining.
CWiMI Director Associate Professor Claire Côte said there were two main goals when they began their water-accounting work.
“We wanted to standardise the way industry communicated about water so it could accurately compare water balance from site to site, and year to year, and align the mining industry with Australia’s progress towards standardised water reporting,” Dr Côte said.
“The framework started as ideas we had written on a whiteboard in one afternoon.
“Before we developed the framework, if we visited a mine and asked information about the water balance, typically we would be given a very long modelling report and it was difficult to figure out what was really going on.
“The pathway to impact has been long, but companies see many benefits of accounting for their water and better understanding where their water risks are.”
It took another 10 years for the MCA Water Accounting Framework (WAF) to become the international standard it is today.
Framework tested at more than 60 mines before becoming world standard
“Getting the WAF ‘up’ has taken much commitment and ongoing effort from the MCA, with assistance from SMI,” Dr Côte said.
“Chris McCombe has been the champion for the work at MCA.
“After supporting CWiMI to write the initial guidance for the tool, he was seconded to the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), where he engaged with many international companies about adopting the WAF.
“What MCA and ICMM did well was to gather feedback from teams who were collecting data to produce water accounts.
“In essence, the framework was tested at more than 60 mine sites on four continents, which demonstrates its flexibility and robustness.”
Based on the feedback, MCA and ICMM released new guidance documents, and the MCA has noted Australia-wide adoption of the framework. Many companies have aligned their metrics and reported using it since 2011.
Conceptual model for mine water accounting. Graph supplied by Minerals Council of Australia.
Conceptual model for mine water accounting. Graph supplied by Minerals Council of Australia.
The WAF offers three crucial strengths:
- It aligns with frameworks for the yearly Global Reporting Initiative sustainability report and Australian Water Accounting Standard (AWAS).
- It allows mine sites to account for, report on and compare site water management practices.
- Its reporting is transparent, rigorous, consistent and unambiguous, resulting in information that can easily be understood by non-experts.
Since the introduction of the WAF, the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed their definition of water indicators.
Image credit: Adobe Stock / nordroden
Impact: Government and mining companies working together to improve compliance
“There have been other unplanned but very important outcomes from the framework,” Dr Côte said.
“In the Bowen Basin, it’s had a huge impact on understanding and communicating risks ahead the wet season.”
“In 2010, the State government proposed a legislation change that would require many mines to increase the capacity of their storage structures.
“Typically coal mines are large and store a lot of water in quite a complex system, so this change had the potential to cost the industry a large amount of money.
“But companies were able to present their water accounting data to demonstrate that most mines had sufficient storage capacity for their whole site and did not need to increase the storage capacity of individual structures, because they could pump water from one to the other – freeing up time and specialists to focus on other matters.
“The policy discussion generated a lot of concern within companies, but then it went away completely because of the work we had done,” Dr Côte said.
The Queensland Government now requests submission of water accounting data to assess if any mines are at risk of a non-compliant release ahead of the wet season.
“You can’t always articulate immediate benefits from research projects – we had never anticipated the framework would lead to significant regulatory updates in Queensland. It highlights why fundamental research is required.”
Impact: The framework’s data format gives accessible information to everyone
From Dr Côte’s perspective, the best example of clear, succinct, transparent and unambiguous communication achieved with the WAF is a water report written by BHP for 2018/19 [PDF, 7MB]. The report presents BHP’s water accounting data and demonstrates how to use that data to analyse water risks.
“When I saw it, I was so proud. They took our research, implemented it, and it’s produced this fantastic summary of water risks,” she said.
“The aim is to write the water balance information so that non-experts can understand it. Companies now tend to make their WAF data publicly available, so people can compare ‘apples with apples’ in a one-page graph.”
Impact: Water accounting can help prepare mining companies for extreme weather events
During the 2010/11 floods, many mines flooded and production halted.
“In 2022, as far as I know, the impact was less. It may not have rained as much as in 2011, but mines have done a lot of work in the last 10 years to better understand water management and put in place measures to manage the wet season.
“Water accounting is part of that work.
“It forced the mines to produce the data needed to calibrate the models, and built capacity for better understanding water balance,” Dr Côte said.
“Once you understand the site water balance, you can communicate it – so it’s easy to say, ‘Listen, we need a review because we’ve got a positive water balance and are going to exceed total storage capacity.’”
Impact: Increasing future capacity by supporting junior companies and personnel
For mines to know their water risks by understanding their water balance, capacity needs to be within the mine staff – and Dr Côte and her team train junior personnel to do the water accounting for their mine.
“We really want them to own it, to know how to do it themselves,” she said.
Since 2010, the CWiMI team have trained over 200 industry professionals who are all now conversant with the framework.
“We also provide a lot of support and advice to junior companies who don’t already know how to do water accounting,” Dr Côte said.
“We improve tools to support them to implement the framework – particularly for water that is diverted around a mine site, which is linked to mine planning, and needs a special tool rather than a water balance.
“We are also working to help people identify the missing pieces to allow them to report all the numbers.
Dr Côte said, the benefits from the WAF also inform future research.
“For us at CWiMI we’ve now got a better understanding of water risks and can come up with research to address those risks.
“Better WAF data means better data to inform our research.”
For more information:
Associate Professor Claire Côte
Associate Professor Claire Cote
Director
Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry
Sustainable Minerals Institute
Email: c.cote@uq.edu.au
Profile: smi.uq.edu.au/profile/3493/claire-côte
Associate Professor Sue Vink
Associate Professor Sue Vink
Principal Research Fellow
Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry
Sustainable Minerals Institute
Email: s.vink@smi.uq.edu.au
Profile: smi.uq.edu.au/profile/2133/sue-vink
Or watch this excellent case study of the myriad benefits of the water accounting framework, presented by Dr Côte.
Associate Professor Claire Côte
Associate Professor Claire Côte
Associate Professor Sue Vink
Associate Professor Sue Vink
See more research from the Sustainable Minerals Institute.
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