What do a mine in Spain and a proposed biosolids fertiliser plant have in common?

What do a mine in Spain and the proposed Glan Devon biosolids fertiliser plant have in common? The connection is not mining, and it is not biosolids. It is the way complex operations can look convincing on paper while still carrying a hidden weakness: the key words are not nailed down.

Let me tell a story to explain what I mean. This is a true story and it’s not all that unusual.

A few years ago a client asked me to review one of their new mining operations. They were having trouble meeting the production levels predicted in their feasibility study. That didn’t surprise me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new mine perform exactly as described in the planning studies. There is always something unexpected. Sometimes it is geology. Sometimes it is equipment. Sometimes it is people. Quite often it is all three.

So I hopped on a plane and, about thirty hours later, there I was in Spain waiting for my contact to pick me up. I made it. My bag did not. Three changes of plane was apparently too much for it, and somewhere over Asia my luggage and I parted company. Thanks Qantas.

These sorts of jobs are always interesting, and this one had the added spice of trying to do the review in Spanish when I do not actually speak Spanish. That tends to focus the mind.

The mine itself was a great little case study. My short version here probably does not do it justice, because what was happening there was tragic in the quiet way these things often are. On the surface everything looked like it should work. The orebody was where it was meant to be. The grades were about what people expected. The equipment was more or less as specified. The commissioning had gone reasonably well. The people were capable. No one was sitting around trying to make a mess of things. On paper it should have been humming along just as planned.

And yet, day after day, the operation was not performing the way the plans said it should.

That is the sort of thing that gets people worried. The plan says one thing. The mine does another. The accountants start asking questions. Managers start looking at dashboards. Engineers look at equipment. Geologists look at the orebody. Metallurgists look at the plant. Planners look at the schedule. The community and employees start to worry. The regulators start asking difficult questions. Everyone can see the numbers are wrong, but no one is quite sure where the problem starts.

So I started to dig.

You might wonder what that is actually like. The first thing is that you need to understand how this type of operation should work. What drives it? What constrains it? What does good look like? That matters, because if you do not know what a well-running operation looks like, it is very hard to explain why this one is not well-running. That’s where industry knowledge and expertise help.

The second thing might surprise people. It is not about standing beside people with a stopwatch or walking around with a clipboard measuring every movement. Underperformance is not usually about people goofing off so measuring people is not the way to solve big problems. It’s actually much simpler: you talk to people.

Not formal interviews. Not “please explain your role in the organisation chart”. Just ordinary questions. Tell me what your job is about. What matters most? How do you decide to do this instead of that? When someone says this word, what does it mean to you? What happens when the plan changes? Who tells you? What do you do when the plant wants one thing and the mine gives you another?

It is amazing what people will tell you if you are actually curious.

That is one reason the Glan Devon proposal worries me. A project like that is not just a shed, a furnace, a dryer, some trucks and a product going out the gate. It is a system. It depends on feedstock, fuel, processing limits, emissions controls, residue handling, product quality, markets, timing, monitoring and compliance. If the words used to describe those things are loose, the whole system can look clearer than it really is.

That was the lesson I took from Spain.

I spent a few days speaking a strange Spanish-English hybrid with the help of a few bilingual people on site. I talked to planners, geologists, metallurgists, operators and managers. I looked at plans, reports and schedules. I tried to understand not only what the documents said, but what people thought the documents meant.

And that was the key.

The problem was not that the people were stupid. In fact, that was the interesting part. The mine planners, geologists and metallurgists were all good at their jobs, but they were using different definitions of the same basic things.

They were all talking about “ore”, “ore types”, “cut-off grades”, “value” and “feed”, but they were not always using those words in the same way. The planners were thinking about the mine in terms of what the material would be worth after treatment and sale. The geologists were thinking more in terms of the amount of metal in the ground. The metallurgists were thinking about how that material would actually behave once it reached the processing plant.

Each view made sense in its own world. None of them was silly. None of them was lazy. None of them was obviously wrong. But they were not the same view.

That was the trap.

One group could call something ore because it met their definition. Another group could schedule it differently because their definition of value was different. Another group could struggle with it in the plant because what mattered metallurgically was not the same as what mattered geologically or financially. Everyone was using familiar words, so everyone thought they were speaking the same language. In meetings, people would nod. In reports, the terms looked neat and technical. In plans, the categories lined up nicely.

But underneath all that, the operation was not really aligned.

The long-term plan was making assumptions about material types and value. The short-term plan was turning those assumptions into truck movements, stockpiles and plant feed. The geologists were classifying the orebody one way. The metallurgists were responding to how that material actually behaved. The marketing and commercial assumptions sat over the top of it all. Each part of the business was making decisions from what appeared to be the same plan, but the meanings had drifted.

So when people said, “we will mine this ore type” or “we will feed that material” or “this meets the cut-off”, everyone thought they understood. But they did not necessarily understand the same thing. That is when performance problems become very hard to solve, not because the answer is complicated, but because the problem is hiding in plain sight.

On about day four I said, in effect, “I think I can see a big part of the problem. You all think you are speaking the same language, but you are not.”

I put that on a few PowerPoint slides, waved my arms around in explanation, packed my bag, and stopped for some duty free on the way home. By that stage my actual bag had also decided to rejoin me, which was considerate.

So let’s come back to Glan Devon.

I am not saying a biosolids plant is a mine. It clearly is not. I am not saying the Glan Devon project will fail in exactly the same way. I do not know that, and that is not the point.

The point is that complex processing businesses depend on shared definitions. They depend on everyone understanding what the inputs are, what the process is designed to do, what the operating limits are, what the outputs must be, and what happens when reality does not match the plan.

That is where I see a similar warning sign.

In the Glan Devon proposal, many of the important operating words appear to be doing a lot of work without, in my view, being pinned down clearly enough. Words like biosolids, non-recyclable waste, treated timber, medical waste, fertiliser product, trial facility, circular economy and performance-based design all sound meaningful. They also sound reassuring. But sounding meaningful is not the same as being operationally clear.

What exactly are the biosolids to be accepted? What quality range is allowed? What contaminants are excluded? What variability is expected? What happens if the incoming material changes? What exactly is included in the combustible waste stream? What does treated timber mean in practice? What is excluded? What is the product specification? Who is buying the product, at what quality, in what season, and under what conditions? What happens if the product cannot be sold as expected?

Those are not side questions. They are the operating language of the project.

In mining terms, they are the equivalent of ore types, cut-off grades, plant feed specifications and product value. If those things are not clearly defined, the business may still look coherent on paper while the people involved are imagining different things. The applicant may mean one thing. Council may understand another. The regulator may assess a narrower version. The community may reasonably worry about a broader one.

Everyone can nod, and still not agree.

That is the lesson from Spain. The plans did not fail because there were no documents. There were plenty of documents. They did not fail because the people were incompetent. They were not. The failure was more subtle than that. The system used shared words without shared meanings, and once that happens the plan starts to separate from performance.

This is why I keep coming back to definitions in the Glan Devon proposal. Not because definitions are bureaucratic niceties, and not because opponents are looking for technicalities. Definitions are how a complex operation is controlled. They are how limits are set. They are how compliance is measured. They are how the community knows what is actually being approved.

A performance-based design may be perfectly valid in the right setting, but performance has to mean something specific. It has to be attached to standards, limits, monitoring, consequences and clear operating assumptions. Otherwise it becomes a comforting phrase that pushes hard questions into the future. And the future is usually when the trucks are already moving.

In a mine, this kind of misunderstanding usually shows up as lost production, extra cost, stockpile problems, plant underperformance and a painful operational review. In a rural waste-processing facility, the consequences could be more serious for neighbours and the wider district. They could show up as odour, emissions, traffic, stockpiles, ash, contaminated water, unsold product, or pressure to broaden the accepted waste streams to make the business work.

That is why this matters before approval, not after.

Before a project like this is approved, the essential language needs to be nailed down. Not implied. Not left to later design. Not hidden inside broad categories. Nailed down.

Because if the people assessing, approving, operating and living beside the project are not using the same definitions, then they may not really be talking about the same project at all.

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