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Summary Advances may prove crucial as easy-to-exploit deposits run dry and miners drill deeper.
In an office trailer parked outside a mine shaft in northern Ontario, operatorCarolyn St-Jean leans back in her chair and monitors a machine loading nickel-rich ore into rail cars deep underground.Once filled, the automated train will snake through a series of narrow tunnels, emerge from a rocky outcropping, then loop past St-Jeans window and dump its payload for sorting.Vale SA, the Brazilian company that owns the mine near this nickel-rich Canadian town, has spent nearly $50 million in two years to install and test the rail-veyor. The company believes the transport system will revolutionize how it builds and extracts new mineral deposits.The equipment is made locally by Rail-Veyor Technologies Global Inc. It is one of many mining technologies that developers hope will allow future production to be run almost entirely by people safely above ground.Such advances may prove crucial as easy-to-exploit deposits run dry and miners drill deeper in more remote places to supply China, India and other emerging economies. The technology could make mining cheaper and safer, avoiding the need to dig wide tunnels and hire large numbers of expensive, skilled workers.As we go deeper, if we continue to apply existing thinking and existing technologies, its a death spiral for company profits, said Alex Henderson, who heads Vales technology team in Sudbury.We need to begin to look at a step-change in mining rather than just incrementally improving our existing processes.The rail-veyor is one such step-change. At the test site, it has halved the time to build a mine, and Vale expects a 150 percent boost in production rates before year end.In Australia, Rio Tinto Ltd, one of the worlds largest miners and an automation pioneer, is rolling out a fleet of self-driving trucks and trains at its iron ore operations. Vale, BHP Billiton and Chiles Codelco are in hot pursuit.Gold miner AngloGold Ashanti is eyeing automation in South Africa, where miners spend hours each shift traveling up and down shafts and ounces of gold are left behind in support pillars each year.Organized labor has made its peace with the automation drive, although there were some concerns that robots would displace humans.Were ok with automation, its part of the changing times and its a good thing for productivity, said Myles Sullivan of the United Steelworkers Canada, whose workers ended a year-long strike at Vale over bonuses and wages in 2010.
