To meet growing world demand for copper, miners will have to start doing things differently, very differently, says John Fennell.
It’s no secret copper is facing some big challenges. Finding more copper is number one, but extracting it in greener, smarter ways so that miners are both profitable, but also responsible citizens is the other.
Technology holds the right promise, but developing reliable “upstream” industrial technology requires lots of time and investment to reduce risks and assure long term performance.
It also requires a new innovative way of thinking, of doing things radically differently that hasn’t always sat easily alongside the realities of day to day mining.
Its this “precision mining” that Hal Stillman from the International Copper Association in the States is championing. I organised for him to speak by video at South Australia’s Copper To the World Conference in June, outlining 4 unique precision mining innovations happening in copper.
These include breakthrough’s in ore sorting, digitised mining operations, beneficiation technology to improve extraction, and dust stabilisation. These breakthroughs have been nurtured by Aurus III, a $65M fund from Chile’s biggest venture capital firm, Aurus, in 2015– the first of its kind in the world.
Chile has also established the XPRIZE open innovation competition, or Zero-Footprint Mining expected to launch early next year. Its aim? To produce metallic copper with minimal impact on the environment by foregoing conventional excavation mining techniques, not generating toxic chemical species, and accomplishing this within the smallest footprint possible, while achieving comparable production costs to traditional copper mining.
The other bit of exciting news is that there is now Aurus 1V, currently raising $100M to address industrial technology innovation in extractive industries including copper, lithium, precious metals, and others.
And, in Australia we are commissioning the University of Sydney’s Warren Centre to undertake a study of the Mine of the Future concept and the Copper Mark Initiative .
What these initiatives hope to do is go beyond current automation & electrification of mines to find, test & commercialise technologies & systems that will make copper mining as precise as possible. That is is both our vision and our challenge.
Cheers, John Fennell