INTEGRATED WATER INFRASTRUCTURE: MINING EFFICIENCY AND REGIONAL BENEFITS *N. Jamett1, S. Vives2, J. Ojeda1, Y. Ramirez1, L. Pagliero3, D. Aitken4 1 Sustainable Minerals Institute International Centre Chile (SMI Chile), The University of Queensland, Santiago, Chile. (*Presenting author: n.jamett@smi-chile.com) 2 Lundin Mining Corporation. 3 Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. 4 Environmental Responsibility in Mining (CERM), Sustainable Minerals Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. ABSTRACT Water scarcity represents a critical challenge for mining operations located in arid and semi-arid regions, where limited natural availability, climate variability, and competing demands intensify social, environmental, and governance pressures. Large-scale mining in these contexts requires reliable long-term water supply strategies, yet water planning has traditionally been addressed at the individual project level, often overlooking cumulative impacts and opportunities for regional coordination. Shared water infrastructure, particularly based on desalinated seawater, has emerged as a promising alternative to fragmented supply solutions, but its territorial and systemic implications remain insufficiently explored. This study evaluates the potential benefits of shared desalinated water infrastructure using a participatory and spatially explicit methodological framework. The framework integrates hydrological, technical, economic, environmental, and social dimensions within a computational decision-support tool, enabling the comparison of alternative water supply network configurations under uncertainty. The approach is applied to a mining-intensive, water-scarce basin in northern Chile through a case study focused on the Caserones mining operation. Two future planning scenarios are analysed, corresponding to the years 2035 and 2045, representing medium-term and long-term horizons. Due to data confidentiality requirements, results are presented in qualitative and comparative terms rather than through absolute magnitudes. The results show that, across both scenarios, optimal solutions consistently integrate desalinated water sources, mining demand, existing infrastructure, and community water provision within a single regional network. Differences between scenarios are primarily associated with the role of desalinated water, which evolves from a complementary source in the medium-term horizon to the sole supply source for the mining operation in the long term. Sensitivity analyses indicate that variations in climate-related and social assumptions do not alter the fundamental network structure but influence the prioritisation of transport routes within the same regional corridors. This
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