Anglo American Platinum said earlier this week that its mechanisation drive was well underway and ready to be trialled at Twickenham, the mining project it is developing in South Africa as it looks to move away from labour-intensive assets in the country. The world’s largest platinum producer is in the process of selling off these labour-intensive mining operations, or listing them as a separate company, as it advances more to full mechanisation. Amplats’ Chief Executive Chris Griffith said in a presentation at the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town that “the trial project we have in place at Bathopele mine currently shows promising results for application at Twickenham.”

Amplats’ mechanisation hub is its Bathopele mine, situated west of Johannesburg, where technology has already made fully man-operated rock drills obsolete, with hydraulic machines are now used instead. The technology includes extra low profile (XLP) and ultra low profile (ULP) drill rigs and roof bolters, as well as ULP dozers, that can squeeze into low height and narrow spaces and which have replaced man-operated, hand-held  jack drills in reef drilling and roof support work. Amplats has said mechanisation plans have long been in the making. But three years of labour upheaval, including a five-month strike last year, and a political push to make the shafts safer have given the new mining methods such as XLP/ULP equipment suites, a sense of urgency. Some of the latest machines have been designed and manufactured by Croatia-based DOK-ING Mining, already with a large ULP dozer fleet operating in South Africa’s platinum industry for some years, and with the new suite due to be production-ready for 2017. Once this is achieved, Amplats aims to complete the implementation of these new technologies by 2019.

Griffith said the mining industry as a whole was under-spending on technology research. “Given the magnitude of our extraction challenges, it is quite extraordinary that the global mining industry currently spends so little on innovation,” he said. “On a revenue-to-revenue basis, the industry spends 80% less on technology and innovation compared with the petroleum sector.” South Africa’s platinum industry, which is the world’s top producer of the metal used for emissions-capping catalytic converters, is still recovering from last year’s record five-month strike that cut production.