Simbio Archives - International Mining

With a Vancouver-based headquarters and operational mines in the Philippines, the US and New Zealand, access to – and sharing of – data for decision making is critical for the optimisation of OceanaGold’s various operations and processes. It is also proving equally important for the company’s pursuit of recruitment and upskilling.

OceanaGold’s vision is to be a company people trust, want to work and partner with, supply and invest in, to create value. This vision comes alongside a plan to grow its gold production from 460,000-480,000 oz, to 580,000-600,000 oz in 2025, all while lowering its all-in sustaining costs.

Data is playing an increasingly important role in achieving this vision, with the company having invested heavily in digital and networking technology in the last few years.

For example, the company has made investments in industrial Wi-Fi across its operations – at the Golden Point underground mine (part of the Macraes operaton in New Zealand), Didipio (Philippines) and Haile (USA) – to improve access to data and company systems.

Michelle Du Plessis, Chief People & Technology Officer, told IM: “This investment is improving operational efficiency by reducing the need for people to leave operational areas of the mine to access data and systems.

“This also enables more of our equipment to be operated more safely and remotely.”

And remote operation of equipment has been growing with the installation of these network backbones, with teleremote underground drilling, loading and hauling in place at Golden Point with Sandvik fleets, plus teleremote loading and hauling – with Sandvik AutoMine®-equipped LH517is and TH551is – occurring at Haile.

There are also plans to switch to teleremote operations from a surface cabin at the Didipio underground mine.

The company is completing the real-time data process loop, with tablet-based mine operation control software – Digital Terrain’s Simbio solution – being implemented at all of its underground operations to, Du Plessis says, more accurately and effectively control underground mine planning based on what is happening in the mine at that time.

At the Horseshoe underground mine at Haile, the newest underground mine within the group, the company is also using digital and data platforms for its mine planning and short interval control systems, with the API-enabled integration coming into the Snowflake cloud-based ecosystem.

Du Plessis says these platforms are fully integrated with shift plans uploaded onto tablets and updated digitally if plans change through the shift.

On surface at the Macraes open-pit operation in New Zealand, the company is also working on the effective digital transfer of data, having recently migrated away from an older version of the Cat® MineStar™ Fleet FMS to MineSense for Miners’ (MS4M) FMS. “The main benefits were more accurate management of the fleet in terms of efficiency and maintenance planning,” Du Plessis explained of this change.

*On surface at the Macraes open-pit operation in New Zealand, OceanaGold is now using MineSense for Miners’ (MS4M) FMS*

Data access and availability is having a positive impact on operational productivity at OceanaGold’s operations, as well as enabling the company to confront the skills shortage it and every mining company is facing at the moment.

Du Plessis said: “At OceanaGold, we are taking a systematic and multi-pronged approach to skills development across the talent lifecycle. This guides the way we prepare our workforce for the future opportunities by building the data and technology capabilities across the company.

“We also have a distributed operational footprint, which allows us to draw on, and foster, talent in multiple jurisdictions and we can take advantage of workforce mobility between the operations.”

Some of the company’s operations are in regions where mining is not the major employer, and there are plenty of people with skills but no mining-specific experience. With OceanaGold prioritising a residential workforce and local employment over fly-in, fly-out options, skills development is crucial for resourcing its operations.

“To help us develop these skills and provide people an opportunity to build a career and have sustainable employment in mining, we partner with experienced training providers and contract mining companies,” Du Plessis explained.

For example, in the Philippines, OceanaGold has partnered with Site WorkReady (Philippines) Pty Ltd to use the Site Skills Training Center in Clark Pampanga. This facility allows the company to train new employees to work in an underground mining environment, with a focus on safety. “We are also looking at the opportunity to extend this partnership to include additional skills, such as automotive and heavy diesel mechanics, to continue to upskill our local workforce,” Du Plessis said.

In South Carolina, where the company has recently commenced mining from the new Horseshoe underground mine, OceanaGold has engaged Redpath Mining Inc in a similar skills development role.

“In addition to their mining contract, Redpath provide training and resources to develop the underground mining skills of the local workforce, allowing us to transition to a full owner-operator model over time,” Du Plessis explained.

The company has also invested in an underground training simulator at the operation, offering potential recruits exposure to the underground environment and building the operating skills of new trainees.

Mastermyne’s contract mining growth ambitions became very clear in September when it proposed a buyout of contractor PYBAR Mining Services in a deal valuing PYBAR equity at A$47 million ($35 million).

The deal, which has just completed, sees Mastermyne, up until this point a company focused on the Australian coal sector, expand into the domestic hard-rock space through exposure to PYBAR’s gold, copper, zinc and lead-related revenues. In the process, it has been restructured under Metarock Group Limited.

The transaction is expected to create a leading Australia-based diversified mining services business with material scale, Mastermyne said, adding that the combined group will have a A$1.7 billion-plus order book and an active tender pipeline of A$2.7 billion-plus after completion. PYBAR will continue to operate as an independent business unit within the group with the existing management team.

Tony Caruso, Managing Director of Metarock (pictured), said the company had identified some time ago the need to diversify into “adjacent markets” to ensure its business retained “resilient and sustained earnings”.

“To be clear, we are very supportive of the coal industry, and we will continue to grow our coal business,” he told IM. “What we do know from 30 years of experience of operating in this market is it is very cyclic.”

When coal prices are strong, it is a great market to be a contractor, Caruso explained. Yet, when prices come down, contractor workforces or scope reductions often follow as mine owners look to cut their “flex costs”.

A diversified Metarock would be able to better cope with such a market dip.

“The theory (behind the PYBAR acquisition) is that when coal is down, other commodities will be up,” Caruso said.

In addition to increased commodity diversity, there are also a huge number of synergies that could be realised with the combination of the two companies.

PYBAR offers raiseboring services that can be used in coal, while Mastermyne offers ground support services (through its recently acquired Wilson Mining business) that can be used in the hard-rock space.

Both have registered training organisations that could share industry best practice across sectors, too.

What Mastermyne learned in the coal boom when it developed the “clean skin” training program, using a simulated underground coal mine with a bespoke program to train people for working in an underground coal mine, may have relevance in the hard-rock sector given the recent ‘boom’ perceptions, according to Caruso.

There are also more specific technology synergies that could benefit both hard-rock and soft-rock customers.

PYBAR has embraced automation and digitalisation with, for example, teleremote loading operations at the Dargues gold mine in Western Australia (pictured below, credit: PYBAR) and the use of Digital Terrain’s Simbio data entry and processing solution on its mining fleet.

Mastermyne has been running a similar project where real-time data is “taken off” machinery and, through proprietary software, converted into real-time dashboards for the operators to track performance against operational targets. Mastermyne used such a system with great success at the Narrabri underground operation, owned by Whitehaven Coal.

Caruso said on the latter: “We were looking at building out that software into other areas of our business – we used that in our production machines when we were cutting coal, but we were starting to look at bringing that across to a lot of the other support services we provide to customers as well.”

Should PYBAR come on board, Simbio could end up being used on its coal development machines, according to Caruso.

It works the other way round, too, with Mastermyne’s proximity detection expertise in coal having applications in the hard-rock space.

“Not only are these solutions OEM-agnostic; they are sector-agnostic,” Caruso said. “The same technology is applicable for coal and metalliferous markets.”

The benefits of the business combination do not stop here.

Growth in the coal space has mostly been tied to sustaining capital projects – the overall production levels have remained flat, if slightly increased – whereas, in the hard-rock sector, brownfield and greenfield projects have been the order of the day, catalysed by higher prices and projections of increased demand.

This means the pressure dynamics around skilled labour are slightly different between the two.

Mastermyne has, to this point, benefitted from the ongoing trend of majors exiting their thermal coal businesses to deliver on ambitious ESG targets, with smaller companies taking on these assets and outsourcing work to contractors. Mining contracts at Crinum (Sojitz Blue Pty Ltd) and Cook (QCoal) in Queensland are two examples of the company taking advantage of this trend.

This type of sustaining growth capital expenditure in the coal sector is very different to the greenfield growth witnessed in 2010-2012, Caruso said. “The significant volume increase in greenfield expansion, which drove real pressure on labour, is not there,” he said.

In the hard-rock space, the dynamic is much more reminiscent of that boom a decade ago.

“There are a lot of new projects in Western Australia opening up so there is a lot more pressure on resources because the demand is far outstripping the supply in the hard-rock labour pool,” he said.

While there has not, typically, been a transfer of labour between the coal and hard-rock contracting sectors, if Metarock is able to facilitate such a shift, it could gain a competitive advantage over peers scrabbling for talent that are focused wholly on the hard-rock mining space.

“We have a workforce of 2,000-2,500 people at the moment, and we want to have a fluid workforce that can move across sectors,” Caruso said. “This will enable us to send our best people to projects to make sure we replicate good performance at these operations, regardless of where they are, geographically, or what type of work they are doing.”

Not only could this provide Metarock with the ability to shift employees between sectors, but it could also allow them to offer employees long-term security beyond the current Australian coal demand horizon.

OceanaGold on the benefits of data-driven transformation

Metarock set to leverage competitive contractor advantage