Tag Archives: Tony Sprague

Bortana-South32

The EMC ready to hand over the baton in mining’s decarbonisation race

The Electric Mine Consortium is not Graeme Stanway’s first innovation rodeo. As the founder of State of Play, a global research platform in natural resources, energy and infrastructure, which also publishes the largest survey on strategy and innovation in mining, he has engaged with many individual and groups of companies looking to spur on mining innovation.

State of Play is the custodian of the EMC and is responsible for bringing almost 20 companies all focused on accelerating progress towards the fully electrified zero CO2 and zero particulates mine together.

Stanway, as Chair of the EMC, has had a front row seat for this journey over the last four years, and was aware the time would come to ‘wrap up’ the consortium’s proceedings – expected on September 30.

“We always knew it was a fixed term,” he told IM. “To be honest, I thought it would be sooner. When we first started, a three-year engagement period sounded about right if things worked well. There is only so long you can keep a core group of companies and people on such an intense innovation journey.”

Four years might sound short – according to Stanway and State of Play’s data it’s the average period that business’ plan their innovation journeys for – but the electrification landscape has changed substantially in that period.

“When we started there was no significant electrification simulation capability, not really any specialised consulting, limited engineering services,” he said. “Now, you can go out and get a study and people are already building mines that are 90% powered off renewables. We also have metrics being introduced that could have a noticeable impact on the way projects go through FIDs.

“The large production equipment is the one thing that is left, but people now know the pathways they need to follow. They would acquire this electric equipment tomorrow if the incentives were there. This would accelerate equipment supply and bring capital costs down, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption.”

He can reference a white paper released by EMC members Perenti and IGO, along with ABB, in May, as an example of how an all-electric mine is possible. It can also be argued that the Australian underground mining sector has caught up and, in some respects, overtaken its rivals in Canada when it comes to electrification. This includes its leading status as an off-grid renewable energy pioneer, as well as hosting the first trial of the world’s biggest underground battery-electric truck at Sunrise Dam in Western Australia’s Goldfields region.

The numbers also back this up, with the EMC starting with five mining companies and getting to 13 in the end. The EMC has also overseen more than 15 non-commercial engagement forums with OEMs and CEOs.

Graeme Stanway (left) moderating a panel session at The Electric Mine 2024, in Perth, in May

Yet, the EMC’s influence goes beyond this, according to Stanway.

Major and mid-tier Canadian gold miners – Agnico Eagle Mines and New Gold, for example – have generously provided valuable input to specific EMC teams, while a significant amount of suppliers engaged with and learnt from that core group of 13 mining companies.

“Many of the small suppliers used this experience as a product and business development opportunity,” Stanway says. “This also benefitted the mining companies that were able to realise new solutions or services in the marketplace.”

One area that Stanway reflects on as lagging his initial expectations was getting trials off the ground.

The EMC has seen over 70 equipment trials across all fleet types, supplemented by an industry first data sharing platform. This has led to accelerated equipment adoption, but Stanway still thinks there could have been more, particularly with larger production equipment.

“I underestimated how quickly trials would get off the ground,” he said. “Even after everyone’s aspirations were laid out and there was a broad understanding of the technology at hand and the opportunities to be had with these, the momentum slowed in terms of moving to trial and adoption stages.”

He also laments that the initial push to accelerate progress towards the fully electrified zero CO2 and zero particulates mine did not result in an overarching commitment to fully remove diesel particulate matter (DPM) from the underground mining sector.

At The Electric Mine 2024 in May, Chris Carr, Acting COO of IGO, said stricter standards for airborne DPM emissions in Australia and elsewhere would “push electrification a lot harder”.

MasterMined Innovation CEO, Tony Sprague, added to this, telling The Electric Mine 2024 that DPM, and specifically nano-DPM, was “the elephant in the room” and the “real driver of getting diesel out of the underground mine and to achieve the electric mine”. He explained: “There is a new [emission] target that is coming from Safe Work Australia that is not far away. When it’s going to land we’re not too sure, but if it does land it’s going to be very problematic for the industry.”

Stanway said some of this reticence could be tied to the “portfolio mentality” of some of the larger mining companies with legacy assets, and a lack of acknowledgement from leaders on the health and safety risks that come with going underground at existing operations.

“The one thing that hasn’t happened with electrification is the wholesale change in leadership intent to shift as fast as possible,” Stanway says. “A lot of these targets, particularly production equipment conversion, are set to beyond 2030 which is outside of the purview of what gets the attention of the current crop of CEOs.

“I think it is the leadership intent that is needed as much as the technology development in this space. Once the leadership intent ‘flips’, the momentum will step up another gear.”

Progress towards the fully electrified zero CO2 and zero particulates mine has still been vast, he acknowledged, saying that the investment climate and mentality has shifted to help fund new technology adoption.

“People are now open to spending more money in areas that come with uncertain outcomes,” he says, referencing investments in artificial intelligence (AI). “In that regard, it’s not just the quantum of money that has increased, it’s also the willingness to spend money in areas that they wouldn’t have before.”

This shift will benefit other complementary areas of mine electrification and decarbonisation – such as automation, AI and energy sourcing.

Yet, there is no obvious next consortium opportunity on the horizon, according to Stanway.

“Electrification was that rare beast in that it was decarbonisation driven so wasn’t competitive at the time we started,” he said. “These types of opportunities only come around once in a while. In that regard, I’m glad we were able to make such an impact in a short space of time, and we’re able to hand the baton onto the consortium members and the broader industry to advance these areas further.”

Epiroc, Orica secure Newcrest Cadia trial for commercial Avatel charging system

Newcrest Mining is set to trial Avatel, a fully mechanised development charging system developed by Epiroc and Orica, at the Cadia operation in New South Wales, Australia, later this year, according to Tony Sprague.

Sprague, Group Manager, Directional Studies and Innovation at Newcrest, said this will be the first commercial trial of the Orica and Epiroc co-developed system anywhere in the world.

Orica and Epiroc, back in 2019, announced joint work on a semi-automated explosives delivery system, enabling safer and more productive blasting operations in underground mines. The companies said the partnership would “bring together the deep expertise and experience of two global industry leaders” to address the growing demand from customers mining in increasingly more hazardous and challenging underground operations.

Avatel includes Orica’s HandiLoader™ emulsion process body, Epiroc’s M2C carrier and RCS 5 control system, working with Orica’s LOADPlus™ control system and WebGen™ 200 wireless initiation system and automated WebGen magazine. Epiroc has also incorporated an onboard dewatering and lifter debris clearing system, while Orica’s ShotPlus™ intelligent blast design software is also being leveraged. These components help eliminate the need for traditional tie-ins and other physical wired connections from the charging cycle.

Orica has stated previously: “This first-of-its-kind innovation enables a single operator to prepare and charge explosives from the safety of an enclosed cabin, several metres from the face and out of harm’s way. Combined with Orica’s LOADPlus smart control system and Subtek Control bulk emulsion, customers can enjoy complete and repeatable control over blast energy from design through to execution.”

Trials with a prototype machine have been taking place at Epiroc’s Kvantorp Underground Test Mine in Sweden under controlled underground conditions. IM understands there are also plans for a machine to head to Agnico Eagle’s Kittilä Mine in Finland to complete extended underground trials in the production environment.

Newcrest’s Cadia operation is set to be the first site to trial the complete commercial offering at Cadia, commencing in the second half of 2022, according to Sprague.

Olitek on a mechanisation mission to provide mine safety step change

IM’s Teams call with Olitek Mining Robotics’ (OMR) James Oliver and Newcrest’s Tony Sprague starts like many other meetings, with a safety share.

Centred on the experiences of a drill and blast expert, Barry Crowdey, owner of Blastcon Australia Pty Ltd, this ‘share’ goes some way to highlighting mining’s hidden safety problem.

“So often we hear about safety shares that are almost instantaneous: rock failures, rock bursts, collapses, vehicle incidents, energy releases, ground collapses, or somebody getting pinned against something,” Oliver, OMR’s Managing Director, told IM. “You have this instantaneous safety hazard you are always trying to protect against.

“The ones that don’t get reported – and are possibly creating a big stigma in the mining industry – is the ongoing wear and tear on the human body.”

Crowdey, a blasting consultant, offers direct experience here.

As a charge-up operator, he was recently side-lined for six months after major shoulder surgery. A whole host of repetitive tasks – such as push and pull activities during blasthole preparation and charge-up – conducted over the last two decades had proven too much for his body.

“A charge-up operator is a highly sought-after job,” Oliver said. “The perception is: you have to be tough to do it well. Barry never complained about this – which probably speaks to awareness around men’s mental health to a degree – and would often use his time off to recover from body soreness likely caused by these repetitive tasks.”

The injuries that don’t get reported – and are possibly creating a big stigma in the mining industry – are the ongoing wear and tear on the human body, James Oliver says

He added: “After stories like this, it is no wonder the mining industry has a stigma for wearing people out and, essentially, taking away more than it is providing – personally and from an environmental perspective.”

Sprague, Group Manager, Directional Studies and Innovation at Newcrest, has experienced some of the strains placed on the human body by carrying out similar manual tasks on mine sites, reflecting on a three-month stint on a blast crew in Kalgoorlie at the height of summer.

He, Newcrest and the wider mining industry are responding to these issues.

For the past three-or-so-years, Newcrest has been collaborating closely with OMR to develop a range of smart, safe and robust robotic systems enabling open-pit mechanised charge-up, blasthole measurement and geological blasthole sampling, as well as underground remote charge-up for tunnel development.

This suite of solutions is tackling a major industry problem that most mining OEMs focused on automating load and haul, or drilling operations, are not looking at.

OMR is addressing this market gap.

“Apart from a small number of mines and in specific applications, the mining industry is generally not ready for automation,” Oliver said. “Effective mechanisation of the hazardous mining tasks is what is needed first. This is where design thinking is crucial – process review, deletion, modification and optimisation to enable robotic mechanisation.”

Sprague added: “Most processes in mining have been designed for fingers and have taken hundreds of years to be optimised around them. We now need to mechanise these processes before we can start thinking about automating.”

The metric for momentum

The injuries that OMR and many others are looking to alleviate with mechanisation of these manual processes are not generally captured by lost time injuries or other similar safety metrics.

Most processes in mining have been designed for fingers and have taken hundreds of years to be optimised around them, Tony Sprague says

This has historically made it hard to invest in such technology – the numbers don’t typically show up in the WH&S reporting.

Yet, the risk of not confronting this issue is starting to have more sway over operational decision making at the same time as technology is reaching a suitably mature level.

“The image of Barry at home recovering from surgery to address career-induced injuries is not the image the mining industry wants to portray any longer,” Oliver said.

And with mining companies competing with other industries for skilled talent, they can no longer afford to put such stress on their people.

The idea, as OMR says, is to maintain process performance with well executed mechanised equipment. “Strain the machinery, not the people” is one of the company’s mottos.

And it will only take a few more frontrunners adopting such technology to affect real change across the industry, according to Oliver.

“Socially, people will speak,” he said. “If the mine down the road has someone in the comfort of an air-conditioned cabin carrying out remote charge-up operations, that news will soon spread. Operators will no longer tolerate being exposed to rock bursts, injuries and the like, and will leave positions where they are put in such a situation.”

It is such momentum that has, arguably, led to the industry backing innovators like OMR.

One of the company’s products, the Remote Charge-up Unit (RCU), is now the subject of a major collaborative project managed by the Canada Mining Innovation Council (CMIC).

Seeking to alleviate the issues associated with loading and priming explosives at the development face, the RCU’s core enabling technology is OMR’s innovative “Trigger Assembly” (pictured below), which enables lower cost conventional detonators to be mechanically installed safely and efficiently. This system is fitted to a modified Volvo wheeled excavator, with its hydraulic robotic boom, and is the key to moving people away from harm’s way in the underground mining setting.

The project is being delivered in a series of development phases through to Technology Readiness Level 7. This functioning prototype machine will enable personnel to move at least 4-5 m away from the underground development face and carry out efficient and effective face charge-up.

This project is moving into the procurement and build phase of the first prototype, according to Oliver.

Newcrest is also one of the major miners steering developments of the RCU, alongside Agnico Eagle, Glencore and Vale within the CMIC collaboration.

While Sprague says his company has injected early seed funding to get some of the OMR work moving, he thinks industry collaboration is key to bringing the products to market.

“What got me into wanting to do these sorts of projects is the belief that the mining industry can be so much better than it currently is,” Sprague said. “We can change this faster by finding smart, agile companies like Olitek and support them with groups of like-minded mining companies to accelerate projects. We are showing that when the industry works together, we can make solutions to our problems appear.

He added: “I’m a true believer that momentum breeds momentum. In these types of projects, I use my finite seed funds and stretch them as far as possible. I might not know how to get to the end of a project in terms of funding it, but if I can get it to a point where we have some TRL3 designs and lab testing to prove the concept, you can go out to the market and find ways to progress up through the technology readiness levels.

“It is about chipping away and progressing up through the TRLs as opposed to asking the industry to blindly invest in R&D.”

Moving up a level

And this is where most of OMR’s technology suite is at: TR5 to TRL6 level.

Oliver explained: “If we look at the RCU unit at the moment, we have a robotic excavator platform that was developed on a sister project. This modular approach we are taking has allowed us to go into new applications seamlessly because of the base technology building blocks we have created.”

Alongside the RCU, the company is working on an “Anako” suite of products, namely: Anako Sense, Anako Sample and Anako Prime.

Anako Sense is a borehole probe sensing machine allowing operators to remotely measure the depth, temperature and presence of water within blastholes. It has been designed to mechanise this quality monitoring process in the open pit, removing operators from danger and putting them in the safety of an air-conditioned cabin. The Mark 2 machine – which is now commercially available – provides faster than manual cycle times, while eliminating fatigue, repetitive strain injury and exposure risks, according to OMR. It also provides real-time data capture of borehole quality measurements.

Anako Sample provides a mechanised sampling process to collect blasthole data. It, again, removes personnel from harm’s way, while providing fast cycle times and repeatable sample quality. It also provides automated data recording. This technology is currently going through Factory Acceptance Testing, with plans to deploy to a customer site shortly.

Anako Prime – for mechanised open-pit charge-up – provides all the benefits of the other Anako products while being compatible with multiple types of explosives. It is leveraging the developments made in the underground environment with the RCU and has a Mark 1 machine completed. Progress is also being made on a Mark 2 version to achieve high productivity, fully mechanised priming and bulk emulsion placement, according to Oliver.

While more products could be added to the OMR portfolio in time, the company is focused on leveraging the proven Volvo wheeled and excavator platform that can scale up from 6 t to 60 t capacities and can move quickly around the mine.

Given the strong collaborative relationship OMR has fostered with Volvo over the years, there is also potential down the line for the Volvo network to support these machines across the globe, providing the machine uptime safety net that many remote mine operators would like if they were to take up the OMR technology option.

The inspiration

Crowdey’s role in this story does not end with the safety share. He is also now training operators on this new equipment, providing a real-life example of the reason to adopt such mechanisation as well as how easy that adoption process is.

Sprague said: “You might think you need to be an expert excavator operator to work these technologies, yet the smart controls, vision and positioning systems for hole location, for instance, means the machines do the hard work for you.”

Oliver added to this: “We say a trainable operator can be sat in that machine and, after a matter of days, be as efficient as a manual operator.”

There is an impending deadline for mine operators to confront these issues, with mechanisation of the most dangerous processes the first port of call, according to Oliver.

“The only way to stop this mining impact is about enabling machinery to do the work and going through a mechanisation process to ensure the Barrys of this world don’t have to conduct these manual processes,” he said. “A good example of that over the last decade is the installation of hose feeders on emulsion pumping units in blasthole charging. That represents a ‘step’ in the right direction, but what we need now is ‘step change’.

“Eventually there will be places in a mine that people simply cannot go, so we better start perfecting mechanisation now as automation will be needed one day. It might be 10 years from now, but, if we’re not mechanised by that point, we will simply not be able to mine these more challenging ore deposits.”

Newcrest, Epiroc and Volvo weigh up new underground mining system

Newcrest Mining, in collaboration with Epiroc and Volvo, is working on a potential new system of mining to improve the safety and efficiency of underground load and haul involving the use of a Häggloader, haul truck and LHD.

The proof of concept trial with Newcrest Mining has already seen testing in Sweden at the Epiroc Kvarntorp mine and at SweRock’s Atle quarry, which saw Newcrest, Epiroc and Volvo contributing equipment and personnel, Epiroc said. This saw an Epiroc Häggloader and Scooptram ST18 interact with a Volvo truck.

Tony Sprague, Group Manager Technology & Innovation, Newcrest Mining, Australia, said: “As mines are getting deeper, and with escalating energy and haulage costs, mining companies must be constantly on the lookout for better ways to work.

“The goal with this proof of concept trial was about setting a baseline on what can be achieved with Häggloader, Volvo trucks and Scooptram ST18.”

The team came together to observe the Häggloader, Volvo trucks and Scooptram ST18 in action both underground (Kvarntorp) and on surface (Atle). Data was collected and improvements were identified by the team, according to Epiroc.

Sprague continued: “We will now move onto the next phase which involves working with Epiroc and Volvo to progress the system to higher productivities and efficiencies.

“Newcrest is setting a rapid pace of technology and innovation change to improve our mining operations. Without the collaborative support from our selected partners, we will not move fast enough, or be as successful. And we select our partners based on their attitude and culture towards innovation. In Epiroc and Volvo, both two great Swedish success stories, we see like-minded companies willing to work together to achieve great outcomes for our people, companies and the environment.”

He concluded: “We are looking for win-win outcomes where all parties involved stand to gain – that’s the best way to drive effective collaborations. With the Häggloader, Epiroc has a unique system of loading that has not been widely utilised into the global mining industry, and Newcrest is keen to help change this.”