Former Rio Tinto veteran Dean Felton says Australian miners need to develop a "manufacturing mindset" to gain the productivity quantum leap via a truly humanless pit and address what are likely to be "frightening" productivity losses rife in the industry today.
Perth-based Felton, who wrote the takeover paper for North Ltd. during eight years with Rio Tinto having also been at Western Mining Pty. Ltd. and Robe River Mining Co. Pty. Ltd., landed at Accenture Plc at the start of March to accelerate Western Australia's major miners' digital drive.
Felton told S&P Global Market Intelligence that that while labor productivity has been well addressed of late with recent cuts, asset productivity has not, and it was time the industry got serious about solutions that address the entire production process rather than tinkering with piecemeal technology pursuits, like drones.
In fact, he said many equipment operators are getting the same direct operating hours out of trucks, trains and the like than they were 20 years ago, despite the newly implemented automation.
"There's lots of work being done in pockets or 'non-prioritized' rather than a synchronized manner — drone work, some automated trucks and rail — but I haven’t seen where someone's actually transforming their end-to-end operation," Felton said.
"I haven't seen anyone who has a really coherent story about how that all hangs together.
With many operators planning on building a new mine every year for the next 15 years just to maintain their production rate, ensuring they can get every ounce or tonne out of the ground will be much more critical.
"If you're losing 25% in your ore body — and I'm not saying that's a standard number, but that's the prize — the goal is to build 25% less mines. So you're still going to build a new mine but you can push it out several years because instead of getting, say, 150 million tonnes out of this pit I might be able to get 220 million," Felton said.
"That gives me more mine life because I need to bring the next one on."
To this end, he said the next big change for miners would occur when humans are completely removed from the pit, and there are two last bastions remaining: shovels, and attaching detonators remotely.
Orica Ltd., a provider of commercial explosives and blasting systems for mining companies, has already made significant gains with the latter, with a production trial recently executed with its WebGen 100 wireless electronic blasting system at the large sub-level cave operation at the Glencore Plc-operated Ernest Henry copper mine in Queensland, Australia.
A second blasting trial occurred at Goldcorp Inc.'s Musselwhite gold mine in Northern Ontario which Orica said delivered reduced dilution, increased truck fill factors and improved overall productivity.
WebGen100 is now commercially available for underground mining applications. The next step is the development of automated charging system for underground and wireless primers for surface mining.
More than individual solutions, however, Felton said the time had come for miners to develop a unified and prioritized roadmap. While it was fine to experiment, Felton said miners have only so much capacity to do so. "We now have to focus specifically on the value-add perspective," he said.
"Mining takes a view that as long as you have the tonnes, you didn't have a loss, even if the mining is being done at the wrong place if a piece of kit breaks down and another area outside the original fully optimized plan is mined instead.
"In manufacturing terms that would be considered a 100% loss, because you're mining in the wrong place and you're going to have to do something in the future to catch that up. Manufacturers would be quite aghast."
