Chilean state-owned copper mining giant Codelco has inaugurated its modern Integrated Strategic Operations Centre (CIO-E) in Santiago, which acts as the central “brain” of the company’s tactical mining control centres, located in Calama, Los Andes and Rancagua respectively. Codelco stated: “As of today, the company is at the forefront in the adoption of advanced technology and progresses in its transformation, to fulfill its commitment to generate greater surpluses for Chile.”
The CIO-E is located in the centre of Santiago and has 500 square metres of space in which dozens of screens are displayed with indicators from all operations, sourced from the intelligent systems of the three CIO-Tacticians: one, located in Calama, operates remotely the plants and equipment of the Ministro Hales and Chuquicamata Underground Divisions; the second, in Los Andes, operates the Andina Division 70 km away and the third deals with the processes of the El Teniente Division from Rancagua, 50 km away. These three centres, to which a fourth will soon be added in Rajo Inca for the Salvador Division. These all fulfill tactical functions, that is, they remotely operate equipment, such as crushers, mills, concentrators, belts, shovels and trucks.
“This centre is an example of mining of the future. Here you can see the sophistication with which Codelco operates; the company’s ability to adopt new technologies that are not only increasing productivity and making more efficient use of mineral resources, but will also benefit the environment, since this CIO-E monitors the use of water, for example,” said the Minister of Energy and Mining, Juan Carlos Jobet, at the opening ceremony of phase 2 of the Integrated Strategic Operations Centre.
“The inauguration of this CIO-E is a milestone in the history of the company and allows it to fulfill a great desire. Those of us who have closely followed the process know the enormous satisfaction generated by having massively permeated the organisation with the best technological standards to organise the mining for the 21st century and put it at the service of a better future for Chile,” explained Codelco’s President, Juan Benavides. Benavides added that “the integral visualisation of the CIO-E will give each tactical centre the necessary support to improve the performance of processes, diagnose problems, provide specialised support in advanced control strategies, monitor conditions for maintenance, carry out activity reports and improve processes via transfer of best practices detected in any of our CIO-T. In this way, 25 specialists in systems analysis and production methods will support the objective of streamlining and optimising the use of our assets, improving processes, as well as standardising the system, management and control of strategic information.”
The first phase of the CIO-E was launched at the end of 2020, providing services only to the CIO-T of Calama, with a focus on the Ministro Hales Division, among them, the monitoring of conditions and support of the control system, and the advanced plant control. The recently inaugurated phase 2, on the other hand, will support the three CIO-Tacticians with analysis of process performance, problem diagnosis, specialised support in advanced control strategies, monitoring of conditions for equipment maintenance or activity reports, analysis of operations, management, development of new tools and process algorithms, and implementation and standardisation of new technological platforms. Additionally, it will focus on operational excellence, by standardising, scaling, or transferring best practices from one CIO-T to another to continually optimise the end-to-end operation of the system.
Regarding the involvement of the CIO-E in Chilean mining, Minister Jobet stated that “this centre also improves the quality of life of workers. Many of the workers who previously had to go to the minesites to carry out tasks, today will be able to operate from this centre or from the other three integrated tactical centres that exist in the different regions of the country. This is an example of the priority of the world and of the mining that we want: a more competitive mining that is projected in real time, that takes care of the environment and that improves the quality of life of its workers. I want to congratulate Codelco for this effort.”
At the CIO-E, opportunities for improvements and optimisation in the advanced control systems in the concentrators will be discovered and they will be able to be replicated in an agile and dynamic way in the plants of other divisions. The CIO-E has the integrated technical and technological conditions to identify and advance in defining the best practices for each operation and propose a new service that takes the best of everything, with a holistic perspective and one that optimises processes.
One of the novelties of the new stage of the CIO-E, underlined by President Benavides, is that it will integrate “the socio-environmental indicators of each Codelco operations center, which constitutes a valuable technological tool for analysis and monitoring of compliance with commitments of sustainable development assumed by the largest copper producer in the world, in line with the global challenges to face climate change .”
The Minister of Energy and Mining toured the facilities together with the President of Codelco, Juan Benavides; the Executive President, Octavio Araneda, and the Vice Presidents of Technology and Automation in Business Processes, Álvaro García; from Mining Resources Management and Development, Patricio Vergara, and from Corporate Affairs and Sustainability, Renato Fernández, occasion in which they were able to verify live the operation of the CIO-E and learn about its attributes with their operators.