Keywords: Rock blasting with explosives; Mine-to-Mill; Innovative Education; Education 4.0; Kuz-Ram; Bond Work Index; Comminution; Latin America; Energy efficiency; Future mining professional; Sustainable Mining; 1. CONTEXT AND PROBLEM STATEMENT Latin America’s mining sector is at a historic inflection point. The region holds irreplaceable strategic reserves for the global energy transition: approximately 40% of world copper production and 35% of lithium are concentrated in Chile, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (Ahmed, 2024). According to the IEA (2024), the market value of critical minerals in Latin America could reach USD 120 billion by 2030. However, the sector faces structural challenges that undermine its competitiveness: energy accounts for approximately 33% of operating costs at a Latin American mine (Skrzypczyk, 2024); ICMM decarbonisation targets require a 30% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 (Gabaldón & Florian, 2024); and deep gaps persist in the training of professionals equipped to operate with the tools that 21st-century mining demands. At the core of this equation lies rock blasting with explosives. Although it consumes only ~2% of total mine energy (Zhang et al., 2022), blasting is the defining operation of the production cycle: its outcomes, fragment size distribution, muckpile geometry, and particle micro-fracturing, directly condition loading, haulage and, above all, comminution (crushing and grinding), which consumes between 37 and 53% of all mine energy and approximately 3% of global electricity (Zhang et al., 2022; McKee et al., 1995). The Mine-to-Mill (M2M) approach, developed at the Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC) from the 1980s onwards (McKee et al., 1995), systematises this principle: marginal investments in well-designed blasting, using the chemical energy of explosives, significantly cheaper than electrical energy, yield substantially greater savings in energy-intensive downstream stages. Despite this well-established scientific foundation, the implementation of the Mine-to-Mill (M2M) approach, which presupposes the integrated management of the entire production cycle, from blasting to mineral processing, remains limited in Latin American operations. This gap stems largely from structural educational constraints: engineers trained under compartmentalised curricula tend to optimise each unit operation in isolation, without recognising the systemic impact of their decisions on adjacent stages. The central question of this paper is: how can innovative education, combined with modern technical mastery of rock blasting with explosives, constitute the catalyst for the transformation of mining in Latin America and worldwide?
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