In the investor presentation accompanying its 2019 full FY results ending September 30, global mining explosives and blasting solutions leader Orica had some interesting updates on the market progress with its latest technologies. First off, its says there is continued growing market interest for wireless initiation technology, which is headed by its WebGen™ offering which was the world’s first in mining.
For Orica alone it has seen 325+ blasts fired worldwide and commercial services contracts secured. It will have 34 trial sites across all regions by end FY 2020. The breakdown of WebGen blasts is as follows: North America (127), South America (39), Asia Pacific (155), and Europe/Africa (4).
To date the focus of WebGen has been mainly underground mining and specifically with WebGen 100, large stope blasts. The company says it continues to make progress with WebGen 200, a smaller version which would allow the wireless initiation to be applied in development faces, which would be a big step forward. Away from underground, Orica says that it is expanding wireless initiation further into surface applications such as gold, coal, iron ore and copper mines.
In other digital technology, there are now FRAGTrack™ installations across all geographic regions while for ORETrack™ the first customers have been established in Latin America, extending to other regions through FY 2020. ORETrack provides RFID-based tracking of rock movement from the blast, while FRAGTrack provides blast fragmentation data with auto-analysis capability.
Lastly, there have now been 42 site implementations of Next Generation BlastIQ™ Technologies and there has been continued deployment of Bulkmaster™ 7, its bulk explosives delivery system, which minimises the number of assets, people and time it takes to load a blast.
The Next Generation BlastIQ™ Platform is a cloud-based digital platform designed specifically to enable continuous improvement of blasting outcomes by integrating data and insights from digitally connected technologies across the drill and blast process. The Old Generation BlastIQ™ has more than 100 customers using the platform, with migration plans to the new version developed.
