In a striking three-storey glass-and-steel building near Perth’s international airport, a mining revolution is taking place – but the real effects of that revolution are felt 1,300 kilometres away. The building houses the Remote Operation Centre (ROC) of Hancock Prospecting’s Roy Hill iron ore mine, which is located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
The staff at the state-of-the-art centre not only oversee the planning, operation and overall management of Roy Hill’s mining, processing, rail and port operations – they actually conduct them. “It’s the only mining company in the world that we know of that actually runs its whole mining operation from a single room, away from the mine-site,” says Steve Travers, general manager at the Internet of Things mining cluster at the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).
“It’s been the perfect opportunity to re-imagine mining, because this is a very new mine, started from scratch. The operations centre has been enabled with new technology such that there’s no latency in the way that they move around data – data flows through the room in real-time, in the same way ore flows from the run-of-mine, through the train to down to the port,” says Travers.
As soon as any key performance indicator (KPI) deviates from the business plan, the ROC knows, and can take corrective action. For example, the tyres of the dump trucks in the mine did not last as long as forecast and budgeted: the business improvement team at the ROC analysed different data, including tyre sensor data, the load on the truck, environmental factors and operator behaviour. The findings were applied to operator training, speed guidelines and road layouts, enabling expected tyre life to be achieved.
The Roy Hill remote operations centre is an “extreme example” of how technological advances in areas such as the Internet of Things, high-speed connectivity and data analytics are changing mining, says Travers. “Getting devices on-site to talk to each other is actually something that the resources industry has been doing for quite a while. We’ve had the basic capability to be able to do this since the mid-1990s – we saw it first in oil and gas. “Where you’re seeing a difference in the modern definition of ‘Internetof-Things,’ the meshing of operational technology, information technology and data analytics, it’s encouraging people to think differently about operations and what they can potentially do,” he says.
The data is the driver, says Paul Snowdon, senior manager of Accenture’s mining practice in Australia. “It’s bringing together all the different applications that drive the mining business, and looking at the data that’s driven from those applications, and understanding what we can do with that.
“Digital innovation is definitely enabling mining companies to look deeper into their assets, to have much more comprehensive uses for the data they get from those assets, to generate new insights, and ultimately make better business decisions,” says Snowdon.
The end-to-end value chain for a mine, from exploration to development all the way through to the customer for the product, has typically been a “very siloed value chain,” says Snowdon. “A lot of information is being generated across the chain, but we haven’t been great at integrating that.
“We’re now starting to use the information in real-time to tell us when problems are emerging with key equipment, from a maintenance perspective, we can start to mobilise more with teams to fix that, integrate more with supply and inventory to make sure that we’ve got all the parts and smarts that we need to fix this issue. Then we can work more closely with production to work out the optimum time to actually take that equipment down, rather than saying ‘we’ve got to take it down straight away’ – which is often not the most cost-effective decision. It’s a much more integrated view.”
There is also a “culture piece” to this technological advancement, says Snowdon. “When you’re breaking down silos, getting data flowing, generating insights such that they’re becoming part of the decision process and going through to action, we’ve seen from the companies in other industries that are going down this path, the excitement becomes palpable.
“When it’s driven from the top, and the engagement levels are high, the change pervades through the business, and you can actually feel it. That’s where the mining industry needs to go,” says Snowdon. The mining sector is “pushing into innovation,” says Travers.
“We see it reaching out into the tech community and asking questions of start-ups, participating in hackathons, and we’re seeing uptake in field tests at mines.
“We’ve got really world-class small-to-medium-sized technology companies, they’re very laserfocused in terms of the things they develop, and what they develop is world-class.
A lot of it is in the safety and remote working area, because we know underground mining in this country – there’s a great desire to do things differently in the underground space, because of the inherent dangers. Not many people realise that it was Australian technology that helped rescue the Chilean miners (after the Copiapó mining accident in 2010, which trapped 33 miners underground for 69 days).”
These technology developers are “going out there and striking relationships with miners of all sizes,” he says.
