At the last innovation showcase Chamirai Charles Nyabeze hosted, some technology providers did not realize their products were complementary—attacking common challenges at mining operations from different angles—until they found themselves in the same room.
This could be an opportunity for these companies to collaborate to consolidate their solutions and how they produce, share and consume data for mining operations, Nyabeze suggested. The cross-pollination that grows out of this type of connection is something he thinks the mining industry ought to embrace at the cross-sector scale when it comes to technology adoption.
Nyabeze is the vice-president of business at the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) and network director of the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MICA) Network, which is led by CEMI and aims to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative and clean technologies for the mining industry.
Compared to the rest of the global mining industry, Nyabeze thinks Canada’s industry is well positioned to lead mining innovation, but it also has room to learn from other industries that are outperforming mining in adopting relevant technologies. “If the dots are all doing wonderful on their own, it’s good,” he said. “But it’s better if the dots start to connect, right?”
Introducing new technology to an existing mining operation is a challenge, no matter how big or small the change. Concerns are bound to arise in terms of safety, regulations and the environment, and it also often represents a significant investment. Yet once in place, new technology can transform a bottom line, so mining companies that refuse to adopt it could miss out on tangible benefits.
To understand how to implement new solutions successfully, the successes of other industries can provide important insights, take out some of the guesswork and even inspire innovation.
Taking the pulse
Mining has a reputation for being slow to adopt new technology. To Don Duval, CEO of NORCAT, that reputation is warranted. “I think there’s growing awareness that for mining operators to enhance safety, productivity and drive shareholder value, they need to balance creative ways to expedite technology procurement, adoption and subsequent diffusion of these emerging technologies within their operations with managing overall deployment and integration risk,” he said.
Duval also acknowledged that technology adoption is easier said than done. He pointed out that 30 to 40 years ago, mining operators developed new technologies in-house and robust research and development programs were a source of competitive differentiation. However, over time, the business case for this practice weakened, as committing long-term investments for highly uncertain technology development is challenging within the economic model of most mining operators. With this transition, “mining operators are no longer builders of innovation and technology,” Duval said. “They’re buyers.”
He believes the industry is still embracing the learning curve when it comes to efficient technology sourcing, adoption and diffusion. As an example, changes in the organizational structure of mining companies and investments into partnerships are speeding up the learning and technology integration process. “Sharing of technology roadmaps, engaging with accelerators and innovation centres, participating in product development with start-ups and tech ventures, building the tech-aligned relevant skills and competencies within your workforce, among others, are becoming strategic imperatives for mining operators to drive continued improvements in their operations,” cited Duval.
In the meantime, NORCAT’s Underground Centre, an underground operating mine in Sudbury, Ontario, aims to expedite technology procurement, adoption and deployment in the global mining industry. Rather than showing up to mine operators with untested technology, technology companies can develop, test and demonstrate their technology solutions and invite potential clients to see it in action for themselves.
For many ventures, the NORCAT Underground Centre becomes the first reference customer to demonstrate that the technology has been de-risked in an operating mining environment, explained Duval. Over the course of an average year, the centre will host over 40 different technology projects from a variety of companies and receive visits from over 50 global mining delegations. He said this “global one-stop shop” for mining technology and innovation has garnered interest from other legacy industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and forestry in the role that it is playing to transform mining.
From Duval’s perspective, the most underestimated challenge in the technology adoption process is the actual integration of new technology, so looking to other industries that have done it successfully can provide useful models. “As an example, industries such as life sciences have developed and tested economic models rooted in co-development of intellectual property to expedite commercialization,” he said. “When managed properly, these partnerships and open innovation platforms can have meaningful results in the market.”
The usual suspect
A buzzy component of many new mining technologies is artificial intelligence (AI). “AI’s superpower is to take lots of data and be able to give you some action from it, to simplify it and bring it together,” said Nadia Shaikh-Naeem, vice-president, programs at Digital, Canada’s Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies—a not-for-profit organization that aims to accelerate R&D investment, technology adoption and re-skilling of Canadian workers across different industries.
When it comes to adopting AI technologies, sectors like finance and health care are the ones to watch, according to Shaikh-Naeem. “The sectors that are looking to pull the data together, that
are working through the issues around storage, access, privacy, security—there’s a lot to be learned from there,” she said.
There is no adopting AI or machine learning without collecting heaps of data to train the models, but in mining, parsing through data is a beast of its own. The continuous nature of the process means layers of data are all tangled together, and getting real-time analysis from such complex data is challenging.
Because health care is also a sector with high-stakes risk management and complex data, its success with AI adoption can provide relevant lessons for mining to get ahead of the curve. “As you can imagine, the impacts on workflows and the impacts on clinical care, et cetera, are profound when you inject a change,” Shaikh-Naeem said.
Another industry where she has seen interesting movement in AI is agriculture. Digital invested in a multi-partner project titled “Standard Data Platform for Autonomous Agriculture,” which pulled together satellite, geospatial, soil data and more to create digital twins that facilitate crop field planning.
When it comes to adapting workflows to AI, Shaikh-Naeem pointed out that the aerospace industry could be held up as a model regarding digital twins, predictive planning and predictive maintenance. “Manufacturing in aerospace has done it in a beautiful way,” she said. The industry also needs to keep health and safety considerations as a priority, increasing its relevance for comparisons to mining.
There are many potential applications for digital twins in mining, such as “during the project development stage, when you’re doing social contracts and you’re working with communities,” Shaikh-Naeem said. “Sometimes being able to show the vision and allowing people to really understand what that mindset experience may look like for the community can support that conversation on both sides.”
Surveying the market
There are plenty of industries to draw inspiration from on Nyabeze’s radar, which has a wide scope by virtue of his roles with MICA and CEMI.
In agriculture, the use of satellite-based imagery to estimate crop yield and weather patterns is similar to satellite-based monitoring of tailing dams, he noted. Nyabeze also sees opportunities for inspiration from small-scale agriculture that could be applied to small-scale mining due to the way that farmland can be leased out to an independent cultivator.
An obvious connection to be made lies in the oil industry’s advancements in automation, which he thinks should be observed closely due to mining’s synergy with the sector. “They’re both remote, they’re both rugged, both of them need high safety, they’re both heavy industry,” he said.
For automation inspiration, Nyabeze also pointed to car manufacturing, where assembly lines produce entire vehicles quickly. “The introduction of robotics and automation is going to allow the mining industry to have more consistency in operation, which means that the mining industry is going to become a more efficient industry,” he said.
From drills to drones and rock breakers, the adoption of automation has the potential to improve the diversity of labour, raise the level of skills in the industry workforce and improve worker safety. “The miners of the future will be high-tech miners,” Nyabeze said. “Otherwise, we’re not going to have a mining industry in Canada.”
However, a common challenge across industries is that the technology is being developed faster than it can be adopted. The challenge therefore extends beyond implementation, because technologies like automation also require miners to catch up on the skills needed to use them properly.
The pace of technology adoption is tied to the pace of the industry, of markets and of regulations. If the Canadian mining industry is not adopting new technology at lightning speed, it does not mean it is falling behind, according to Nyabeze. “If anything, we’re pushing the envelope to move a little bit faster, a little bit ahead of the curve in Canada,” he said.
Branching out
To stay ahead of that curve, there are a number of different pathways available to those curious to learn more about innovation in other industries. Publications from other sectors, cross-sectorial networking events and cluster organizations are good places to start, according to Shaikh-Naeem.
One of the companies Digital invests with is subsurface intelligence company Ideon Technologies. The business started out from an idea at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre at the University of British Columbia, during testing on cosmic-ray muon tomography—a rough equivalent of conducting an X-ray on quantum particles to create 3D models. Eventually, someone asked if it could be applied to mining, and Ideon was spun out into a company in 2018.
Now, several years later, the AI-powered imaging technology is being deployed across the globe to help miners identify, map and characterize mineral deposits. “I think we sometimes feel like we need to always have answers before taking action,” Shaikh-Naeem said. “Sometimes, we just need to ask the questions and listen.”
Beyond what mining can learn from other industries, Shaikh-Naeem wishes the conversation would also grow to include how mining can work with other industries to foster mutual learning.
“There’s a real opportunity for us to leapfrog,” she said. “To support meaningful productivity [and] ensure that resources are used in the most meaningful way.”