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Next Level mining

Securing the future of mining through integrated operations and advanced information technology

Why "Next Level" mining?

The drivers

The challenges

Opportunities and benefits

Internet of things, services & people

A great productivity shift is required

Today, in the mining and minerals sector, there is a productivity shift underway that is set to transform the industry. The sector has already undergone four step-changes which facilitated radical productivity gains.

mining the drivers

For example, the gradual mechanization of underground mining in the first half of the 20th century including the development of conveyors, loading machines and drill rigs dramatically increased tonnage per worker.

More recent advances like longwall-mining equipment, driverless trucks and recent developments in remote operations and control systems, enable today’s miners to produce many times the ore with fewer workers and better safety than ever before. The challenge, however, is that the last step-change of technology has now been exhausted: haul trucks are already big, pits are already supersized, and infrastructure is being pushed to its limits. Coupled with this are changing market dynamics driven by:

Harder to reach deposits
The easy-to-reach deposits are rapidly depleting. New ore reserves are more technically challenging than at any time in history and are located in remote or politically complex regions. Reaching this ore means going deeper. As costs go up, so must productivity if mining companies are to stay profitable. Furthermore, going deeper carries more risk and the fewer people that work at depth the better it will be for mine safety. Technology is evolving rapidly, bringing the ability to extract more from less and to profitably go deeper, wetter and further than ever before.

Increasing commodity prices
Over the past five years or so commodity prices have remained reasonably flat, or have declined. High price volatility, caused, in part, by supply disruptions, tight markets
and new pricing systems, are also having an impact.

Rising demand
Demand is rising so mine operators need a highly flexible infrastructure in place so they can raise production quantities when needed. Even a modest three percent growth per year results in a doubling of demand in just over 20 years – not a long time in the mining timescale.

Challenges facing the mining industry

In addition to the productivity shift, the industry is also being driven by a plethora of challenges including, but not limited to:

Improving safety
Managing capital projects
Maximizing productivity
Ensuring equipment operates reliably and predictably
Encouraging collaboration between different departments

Here we take a look at some of the challenges and the role technology can play.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Improved safety requirements

Workers, contractors and visitors are often surrounded by many dangers, from hazardous environments to potential collisions and accidents with machinery.
Mines can collapse, ventilation can fail and result in exposure to toxic mine gases, explosive gases and dust.
The challenge is prevention and being able to act on problems quickly and effectively.
Worker safety must be improved, especially in underground production areas.

New smart programs and technologies such as location awareness, GPS, RFIDs and collision detection/ avoidance bolsters safety.
Companies deploy automated identity and security management programs that centrally track employees’ access rights, location, duration, training, safety certification, permissions, compliance and site security.
Safer mines for workers, which reduce injuries and fatalities, which in turn reduce downtime, insurance costs and litigation, while improving employee retention, recruiting and morale.
Certainty of which worker is located and for how long, with what training, safety certification and access privileges.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Managing aging assets

Availability, maintenance, financing and deployment of assets is critical to mining operations.
Every moment without the right equipment or transportation can have severe effects on productivity and profitability for miners.
Emergency repairs have high costs, not only for the repair itself, but because the asset is down and not producing revenue.
Repairs are typically performed reactively after the asset is down.
Asset management is performed separately across sites or geographies and often involves manual or unconnected information, processes and systems.
Asset management is separate from other business planning functions.

Assets are instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, reporting their location, their status and other key metrics remotely and automatically
Predictive condition monitoring is used where systems using predictive data modeling trigger maintenance orders before equipment failures happen, thereby preventing breakdowns before they happen.
Reduces time, expense and downtime that repair incur.
The entire asset management life cycle needs to be viewed and technology can help determine the optimal way for these assets to behave and interact with each other.
Condition and health monitoring improves uptime and reduces emergency repairs.
Asset management is integrated with other business functions and systems, such as ERP.

Challenge	Consequence	Technology benefit
Low productivity and efficiency	Increasing productivity and reducing costs are critical to the success of mining operations - both are needed without compromising customer service, safety or operational flexibility. Production scheduling is manual, reliant on the skill of the scheduler, and often carried out without due consideration to the overall supply chain. Different sites and departments run their own procurement activities independently of one another, duplicating purchases and driving up costs. Sites have a large number of independent equipment and systems, each with its own information and interfaces. Islands of automation dominate with operators and control room staff looking at different screens and having only separate pieces of information at hand. This lack of unity and integration goes all the way into the control room, making it difficult to decide in a timely manner.	Scheduling is integrated from mine operation to shipping, including blend design and dynamic order book allocation to stocks in the system wherever they are. Production supervisors use advanced optimization capabilities to determine the optimal material blend option and scheduling production to optimize mine/plant throughput. Strategic procurement programs work to reduce costs and wastes in the supply procurement process. Lower operations cost and improved margins. Greater production and revenue. Greater return on capital employed. More responsiveness and flexibility. Better delivery performance. Integrating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) will provide greater visibility of operations.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Islands of automation

Current technology has grown in a diverse and chaotic way with islands of automation giving managers the feeling that they are drowning in information and yet still unable to find the answers they need.
Hard to manage disturbances due to lack of real-time data and common visualization of the mine operation.
Independent items of equipment and systems from different suppliers each have their own data and interfaces. Operators look at different screens with small, fragmented pieces of information. Decisions cannot be made in a correct and timely manner.
Reactive and time-based maintenance are dominating maintenance strategies.
Lack of data acquisition systems and real-time data complicates more proactive strategies.

Technology changes how mine operators view and interact with their operations and markets. Technology helps overcome inefficient scheduling, waste and labor intensive activities.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Lack of collaboration

Suppliers, customers and partners rarely interact.
Elements of the supply chain are isolated from each other.
Remote locations often mean that teams are isolated and rarely talk with a central control room or other mines.
Mine operators need to invest in new tools and new skills for true collaboration

Technology, innovation and R&D encourages collaboration throughout the company and with partners, vendors, suppliers, customers and all other parties within the supply chain. This builds customer loyalty and even new revenue streams.
Sharing the same information and knowledge helps resolve common issues, improve relationships, enhance productivity and develop more accurate plans such as forecasting accuracy. Challenges are resolved quicker and more effectively.
Teams communicate and collaborate across the enterprise including multiple mines and sites. Activities are coordinated through a central control room or location.
Productivity and performance are enhanced.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Energy volatility

Globally, government regulations are increasing:
- Australian Emission Trading Scheme
- European Union Emission Trading Scheme
- Kyoto Protocol
Carbon, water, energy and waste are managed manually with little automation or integration.
Mining is perceived as environmentally unfriendly.
In many mines there is little, or no, integration between the processing and power parts of the operation, making it difficult to determine where energy is actually used.

Current technologies and programs can track and monitor carbon, water and fuel from end to end and extend to footprint management, waste management, ecosystem risk management, mine closure and re-habitation, tailings placement management and stewardship management.
Technology helps reduce energy expenditure and regulatory costs.
Processes, information and analytical tools are used to proactively manage environmental and energy consumables, such as modeling carbon trade-offs, carbon trading, water management, fuel optimization and waste control.
Reduced energy costs.
Reduced management costs and improved effectiveness in the management of consumables that impact the environment (e.g. carbon, water, energy, waste).
Tighter compliance with regulations and reduced costs of meeting/monitoring regulations.

Challenge

Consequence

Technology benefit

Recruitment, retaining skills and aging workforce

More of the workforce are retiring; transferring their knowledge and experience to the new generation is a challenge, especially as the experts are dispersed and often unavailable.
Newer employees have different attitudes and expectations.
Difficult to recruit and retain competent staff to run mining operations in remote and inhospitable locations.
More than a third of the industry rely on human intelligence to optimize their value chain.

Knowledge is captured and delivered to the right workers at the right time, driving improved decisions, better execution and higher productivity and margins

Global workforces and expertise are optimized through virtualization and remote operations
Management organization is “lean and mean” with centralized organization and reduced cost structure, with streamlined and rapid decision-making.
Administration is streamlined and cost effective.
Mining appears an attractive career as it is a high-tech, fast-paced industry that projects an image of environmentalism and responsibility.

The future of mining, lies in automation and integration.

Although demand for commodities is growing in the long term, the mining industry currently faces a unique set of challenges: Competitive pressure is driving miners to find ways to increase the production rate of their operations, reduce the cost per ton produced and extend the life span of mine sites or establish new ones. People and asset productivity has to rise too as flat underlying commodity prices, rising production costs and high price volatility are currently forcing miners to reduce capital expenditure. Indeed, productivity improvement is now fast becoming a key competitive differentiator and is being built in to financial projection models.

Added to all this is an aging workforce. In common with other industries, the age profile in mining is slowly creeping up and retiring workers are leaving with valuable know-how and experience. The situation is exacerbated by the remote and inhospitable location of many mines, which makes it difficult to bring in experts and recruit and retain competent staff.

The solution to all these challenges, and the future of mining, lies in automation and integration of information and the use of that knowledge for real-time optimization of the mining processes.

An integrated view

Automation is not new to mining, but the automation employed in mines is generally more basic than in other industries and is often limited to simple control of motors, equipment or certain parts of processes. Further, mines tend to have a large number of independent pieces of equipment and systems from different suppliers.

Each of these “islands of automation” can have its own data, data format and interfaces, and operators and control room staff must scrutinize a multitude of conceptually disconnected screens in order to coordinate different parts of the process.

The key to the future of mining, then, lies in total integration of data and work processes meaning convergence to channel more and more information from real-time systems into software, enriching four key areas that will enhance efficiency, responsiveness and profitability across the mining value chain:

Intelligent production, and higher people and asset productivity
Data integration can dramatically improve production efficiency and productivity. This can be done through:
- Process optimized according to ore properties
- Production targets optimized according to market conditions
- Wireless communications enabling just-in-time optional process management

Intelligent response to critical asset condition in real time
Failure of a critical production asset can have a catastrophic impact on production targets. The loss resulting from a main conveyer failure, for example, can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. A modern asset optimization system can help mines to go from reactive to predictive maintenance strategies, avoiding unnecessary maintenance and reducing operating costs. Extended automation solutions such as System 800xA can integrate modern maintenance systems from suppliers such as IBM, SAP or Ventyx. Real-time data on asset conditions can then be used to streamline maintenance effectiveness and enable condition based monitoring.

Demand-driven planning improving profitability
The mining supply chain extends from the extraction of raw materials through the transport of products to the end customer. To achieve production and productivity targets, mining companies need to achieve high operational performance and efficiency across supply-chain processes. Better integration and automation across processing plant operations, mine planning and asset maintenance/management will guarantee the right product is available at the right time. It will also make sure that customer orders are accepted only when the supply chain can deliver them, thus improving negotiating power and risk management. In addition, this unified view ensures that equipment maintenance can be scheduled to minimize impact on production schedules while maintaining the required level of availability.

Reduced energy consumption and waste
Improvements in energy efficiency can be driven not only by improvements in mining processes and technologies, but also by greater visibility and process control across the value chain through information integration and process optimization.

Remote operation centers enabling the vision
Mines of the future will be run from remote operation centers. Data from all parts of the operation will flow together to allow precise management of mining – from rockface to end customer – and resources and production to be optimized across multiple sites.

ABB refers to the “Internet of Things, Services, and People” (IoTSP) when talking about the vision of integrated industry.

Key components of the IoTSP :

Things, Services, and People

Things or devices are equipped with sensors, computing power and software. For many years already they have been capable of communicating with one another. These devices are already used in ABB’s automation and network control systems serving customers worldwide. Such devices can be regarded as essential components of an ‘Industrial IntRAnet’.

New technologies such as mobile communication or cloud computing help to evolve the Industrial IntRAnet towards the Industrial IntERnet. Essential properties of today’s solutions (eg, plant safety, reliability) remain relevant. Other requirements like cyber security and data privacy will become more important for all players along the IoTSP value chain.

Services will become more advanced through the use of data analytics. Analytics solutions in the IoTSP will provide new opportunities to optimize operations. However, if the analytics results are not turned into improvement actions, customer benefits remain low. ABB sees the evolution towards an IoTSP as an opportunity for new service models that implement the identified improvements in collaboration with partners and customers.

People will not be obsolete in a world of IoTSP as they remain in control of the entire production process. People will be the decision makers, and will program and control all activities performed by things.

ABB’s customers value investment protection for their existing installations. ABB is introducing new technologies compatible with the installed base, without compromising safety or reliability. Implementation of the IoTSP will require common standards. ABB is supporting the development of such standards to improve interoperability throughout the industrial community.