Sustainable operations in 2020 and 2050.

The populations of the world are beginning to demand that all business operates more sustainably. Everybody, but particularly policy makers can see that we need to do things differently if we expect to have a long term future on the planet. Here we present two views of the mine of the future, seen in terms of their ability to operate with as low a carbon footprint as possible. We picked those two dates because in 2020, many of the current operations will still be going, so the 2020 story is one of how we change the current mines to use less carbon. In 2050 we have the opportunity to consider what can be done with enough time to design in sustainability, and we have upwards of 35 years of technology advances to show a really different type of operation.
Most of our carbon footprint in mines of today comes from how we construct our operations, what we use for fuel, how we operate the business, and how we actually mine and deliver our products. That’s not everything, but it is the lion’s share, and how we respond to these issues will determine what our mines look like in the future.
Sustainability in Mining in 2020.
Today we will visit an open cut copper mine that has been operating since the late 1990’s. New technology developments mean that this mine still has many years of life left, so there is opportunity to make longer term investments in the operation that leave plenty of runway to recoup the investment.
When it was built, this mine was designed with large vehicle transport as the main basis for the layout. It used traditional building methods, heavily reliant on concrete slabs for buildings and metal and concrete workshops and warehouses. An extensive system of haul roads and access roads serves most of the mine areas. This means that the mines operation is heavily dependent on haul trucks, water trucks and light utility vehicles, as well as all manner of mobile mining and drilling equipment, shovels, graders etc.
As we drive into the mine, we need to stop at the security entrance and log ourselves in. Before we came we enrolled in the biometric access system, and completed the visitors safety induction on line. To one side of the gate there is an oil bunker, full of locally produced biodiesel that it used to power the entire fleet of mobile equipment, and much of the fixed plant as well, specifically the generators which are turbines fuels with bio-diesel.
We travel over to the workers accommodation town where the 250 workers are housed while they are at the site. The workers each have a small unit with its own composting toilet, solar/electric hot water, but without air-conditioning. Even though the temperature here can be very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter, the units have been designed to stay within a comfortable temperature range year round. They use orientation to the sun, deep eaves, ‘green’ concrete slabs which incorporate fly ash and which provide a heat sink to help warm the unit in the winter. All of the water used by the showers and toilets is recycled for use in the mining operation if possible, or for maintaining the gardens.
Our tour of the sustainable aspects of the site includes a visit to the operations room of the mine. The operations room has two walls lined with video monitors. These low power monitors use look just like paper, and can be folded up and moved around. Some are displaying real time videos of some of the key operational areas – one shows the ore conveyor, another shows the shovel loading the haul trucks. Different scenes are cycling through and if any operation begins to operate outside of parameters an alarm sounds and the ops system immediately allocates some monitor space to viewing that process. One whole wall depicts a similar room in the capital – some 500 kms away where mine planners, maintenance planners, and managers are helping the on-site workers to deal with issues, contribute to planning and provide advice on optimizing the operation. That group is helping a number of different mines at the same time.
Out on the site, haul trucks are moving ore to the crushers and from there it goes to the leach heaps. Like today, sulfuric acid is added to the heaps, but a series of sensors spread throughout the heap controls the flow of acid to maximise the process efficiency.
All of the technologies that power these ideas are available and in use today – some in mining operations, some in other industries. They need to be because if the mining industry wants to implement these things by 2020, they need to be starting in the next few years. To look for some really different ways of operating, we’ll look out to 2050.
Mining in 2050
Operating mines in 2050 might not be in their planning stages until 2045. That allows us to contemplate technologies that will have the benefit of 35 years of development. Futurists will tell you that predicting 35 years of technology development is really difficult – but we’ll do it anyway because it is also really fun.
A mine in 2050 will look very different that 2020. For a start, there will be very few people because almost all of the machinery will be automated. The entire area of the open cut will be highly secure, to prevent people entering areas where large machinery is operating at very high speeds. The site will look more like an airport than a mine, with service areas located at the edge of the secure area. The only people on site will be a small security group to ensure that unauthorized people don’t enter the site, and a small group of maintenance engineers that operate the vehicle maintenance facility. Because there are so few people, there is no need for the vast infrastructure that currently supports the on-site workforces.
Within the mine we see large numbers of small vehicles operating at speed, and without human drivers. Technology originally designed by NASA to guide the Mars Rover, and newer planetary probes on the moons of Jupiter is now being used by these vehicles. The vehicles are multi-purpose and directly access the mine plan (updated daily by planning software and mine engineers working in the capital city) and using collaborative machine to machine protocols determine the most efficient way to deliver against the days mining targets. The vehicles self-configure as micro-haulers, drill and blast vehicles, or road maintenance vehicles in the morning, and can change configuration throughout the day as the mine operating plan changes dynamically in response to the days events.
All of these vehicles are electric, powered by onboard hydrogen fuel cells. A big part of the mines operation is the generation of Hydrogen for fuels cells, and this is achieved using a combination of renewable sources, solar power, wind power and hot rock geothermal power which is used to produce hydrogen from water. Hydrogen is stockpiled so that it is available for use at all hours of the day and night. This allows the entire mine to be worked with zero emissions, and all water is recycled. In this mine, saline ground waters are desalinated using waste heat from the hydrogen plant so that water lost to the environment through evaporation and water vapour from the hydrogen cells is replaced. (A further consequence of this is that groundwater salinity problems of the last century are being clawed back, and the landscape is regenerating.)
Finally, this mine uses nanotechnology to extract the copper from the ore. The large chemical leach heaps have been replaced by hybrid bio-mechanical nano-extraction techniques where bacteria sized cyber-organisms are bred in large ponds, migrate into the heaps, directly harvest the copper metal from the ore using biochemical reactions. They incorporate the copper into their bodies and then move to an extraction pond where they die, and decompose leaving elemental copper that can be easily recovered from the pond.
All of these technologies are being researched or developed now. If anything, this vision of 2050 will prove to be outrageously conservative. If, for instance, nanotechnology, materials science and renewable energy technologies develop along the same kind of timeline as we are used to seeing now then it is arguable whether the economy will need mining at all.