Q. What is a circular economy and how is it disrupting the industry?
In the mining sector there is a drive towards achieving what we call ‘Triple Zero’.
These are: zero harm which refers to worker health and safety, cyber security and social trust at an organisational level; zero loss which is end-to-end value chain optimisation and ROI for capital projects; and zero waste which is recycling, recovery and value from waste such as waste water, carbon neutrality, creating value for waste products. The transformation to a circular economy has to be linked to these outcomes by leveraging advanced technologies to achieve a steep change in productivity, safety and climate or waste.
This represents a very different future where mining can sustain the creation of new cities and improve the standard of living for communities.
What we are starting to see, as consumers are becoming more savvy, is that they are demanding it all the way through the supply chain.
Circular economy really goes to the heart of two things: one is that consumers now have the expectation that you will reduce any kind of waste in the entire life cycle from the point of, for instance, taking the minerals out of the ground through to the end consumer product, and the consumer expects that all the parts and components can be used and reused and bought back into the ecosystem.
The second part of it is making sure that you’re getting to the heart of the waste, so you’re not trying to produce products and services that aren’t going to be used at the end by the consumer.
In mining that could be on-demand mining for a specific product so that you’re not stockpiling resources ahead of demand.
If we can forecast demand to the point where you know exactly when it’s required, you can produce it from mine through to the end product on demand.
Q. How far along is the mining industry to realising a fully circular transformation?
It is a multi-year journey, and we’re at the very beginning of that.
We like to think of it as a digital transformation story, but we’ve come to realise that digital isn’t the end game.
We are starting to optimise and transform parts of business, but what’s missing now is the end-to-end ability to string together the entire supply chain from mine to end product for a customer.
What we’re finding is that we have pockets of automation happening, pockets of digitisation happening across different industries, but we don’t have it working across an entire organisation, or across organisational boundaries.
I think that is the next big step we will see business start to adopt.
Q. Who are the leaders in this circular economy space within the mining industry and what are they doing?
More than 70pc of Rio Tinto’s electricity consumption is already from renewable energy sources.
Glencore has more than 50 years of recycling history, and is one of the world’s largest recyclers of electronics and a major recycler of secondary copper, gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
Vale is repurposing iron ore tailings into engineered stone, turning waste into new value.
And Anglo is working towards recycling or re-using water to meet 75pc of its global water requirements.
Its intent is to operate waterless mines in water-scarce areas.
It wants to eliminate fresh water from usage from mining processes – and to eventually achieve a near-waterless mines.
Q. What is the post-digital age and what will it look like for the mining industry?
What we are starting to see is that digital is no longer a differentiator.
If you are in business, you are effectively a digital business.
In the past, we were focused heavily around SMAC (social media, mobile, analytics and cloud).
But we are starting to look at the next set of technologies.
We are starting to see the next wave of technology come about, which will bring the next level of innovation or digital transformation and those are DARQ and DoT – a set of super technologies, with blockchain AI and machine learning, augmented reality and extended reality, and quantum computing.
Right now we are seeing people do things at the very peripheries – they may have created a better employee platform, or and end product, but the entire supply chain isn’t yet automated.
Q. Where are we in this transformation?
Algorithm is king. Whoever has the best algorithms creates the best efficiencies and therefore gets the highest profit margin.
In the past we were doing lots of data mining and analytics on top of static data, but we had nowhere to take the algorithms and test them out, except the field, and that’s not always possible or feasable.
If you look at AI machine learning at the moment, the current way to develop new algorithms is that you need a simulated environment.
You need to simulate all the “what if” scenarios to test these algorithms over and over again in a confined environment where you can control all the variables.
The only way to do that right now is to create really physically rich or immersive environments.
The way you do that is to use AR or VR to create simulated environments where you can create and train your algorithms over and over again.
You can use those technologies in combination to create the next set.
Q. What does a post-digital mining industry look like?
If you look at something like DoT, AI and quantum computing, the big factor going forward is data security.
The big challenge with sharing data is making sure that it is quantum proof.
Quantum computing will allow people to break current encryption methods.
Even sharing data now, with current encryption methods, quantum computing may be able to go back in time to decrypt data that was encrypted using today’s mechanisms.
No one wants to share data but if you combine DoT, which allows you to trace data for its entire life cycle, use the new set of AI machine learning tools available in the cloud to create these new types of algorithms, and finally quantum computing, you can take data sharing to a whole new level.
In Australia we are using a world-leading method called ‘homophorphic encryption’ and that takes those three technologies and puts them together.
Essentially, organisation A and organisation B both have valuable sets of data, and they don’t want to share it with everybody, so homophorphic encryption can create new mathematical techniques to share that data, keep it secure, and also combine the data set between the two and really create something new.
And then there is the IT to Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) conversion.
The mining industry is doing a lot of IIoT work going forward and there is an emerging aspect of it.
So, as more and more devices become connected to the internet, there is a whole security aspect that is starting to become challenging.
We’re now starting to see digital transformation go beyond IT landscape in the mining industry and out into the field with the operational landscape as well.
