Editorial comment
The mining industry is often overlooked within the green economy narrative, though it is perhaps the most foundational character in the story. From rare earth elements in high-efficiency solar panels to lithium-based electric car batteries, the global transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure is impossible without the minerals produced by the mining sector.
The energy transition is putting significant pressure on the industry to recruit and retain the skilled workforce necessary to meet the surging mineral demand. This is particularly in the face of an aging workforce that is rapidly retiring, as 50% of American mining workers plan to retire in the next five years.1 Despite strides in environmental and social responsibility efforts, mining still faces perceptions as dangerous and ‘dirty’, hindering recruitment efforts with younger generations.
The digitisation of mining – particularly the rapid adoption of automation that is currently underway – holds the potential to dramatically reshape that dynamic.
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The ‘greenest’ mining is autonomous mining
Here at Pronto, we like to say that the ‘greenest’ mining is autonomous mining. Automation delivers a wide range of established ‘green’ benefits to operators, including more efficient use of consumables – such as fuel and tyres – through more controlled driving, adherence to speed limits, etc. Less widely discussed are the even greater potential impacts that autonomy can bring to the industry, via enabling the economics of using smaller haul trucks.
Haul trucks have historically gotten bigger over time, primarily to minimise labour costs – the more material one truck can move, the fewer trucks and drivers required to operate them. But those labour savings come with consequences, including environmental impacts. Bigger trucks need wider roads, which necessitate shallower pit designs, which require more overburden to be removed before productive ore is reached. With a circular pit design, the net impact of every extra foot of haul road width is exponential in terms of tonne-kilometres of unproductive overburden moved to reach the same volume of ore. Fuel efficiency also generally decreases with truck size, contributing to the exponential increase in the carbon footprint of an ore body mined with large haul trucks versus one mined with small haul trucks.
Autonomy eliminates the previously immutable ‘one truck to one driver’ ratio from the haul truck fleet optimisation calculation, which leads to the economics favouring smaller trucks. With smaller autonomous trucks, mines can not only dramatically reduce their carbon footprint, but also reduce their physical footprint. With steeper, smaller diameter pits, less of the environment needs to be disturbed to reach the same ore body.
Upskilling and job creation is happening
As the industry embraces a digital future, the portion of the mining workforce currently dedicated to operating equipment in the field will transition to positions operating and overseeing autonomous technologies from an office. The net impact will be a safer, more highly skilled, more highly paid workforce.
Automation can lead to significant improvements in the efficiency of mining operations – research that we conducted with Whittle Consulting suggests that utilising small autonomous trucks could lead to a 30 – 40% improvement in the net present value of a mine over its lifetime.2 Those kinds of economics can easily support migrating equipment operator jobs into higher-paid technology support positions, while still delivering outsized contributions to the bottom line. We have heard anecdotally from a number of industry participants that to date, with over 1000 autonomous haul trucks deployed around the world, not a single net job has been eliminated by autonomy.
Autonomy promises to transform the mining industry in myriad ways, but one of the most underappreciated and significant is its potential to help solve one of the most intractable problems facing operators – a looming skilled labour shortage. By helping the industry trade higher-risk, manual labour positions in far flung mine sites for safer technology jobs in offices that are foundational to decarbonising the global economy, autonomy is going to be far more central to the future of the mining industry – and mining jobs – than many realise today.
