GLOBAL miners have scoured deserts, mountains and jungles for resources to rev up their profits. More recently, the search has taken them to a different environment: the factory floor.
Car production lines and machinery that sorts rice could help companies such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton wring greater profits from mining. Whereas miners spent a decade spending billions on acquisitions and new projects, they are now taking an opposite approach — conserving cash while waiting for commodity ¬prices to recover.
The hills around Kennecott, Utah, are home to one of the world’s biggest copper mines. Recently, Kennecott has also become the location of a machine the size of four London double-decker buses that Rio hopes will cut down on the quantity of rocks that need to be crushed in search of copper. The equipment is supplied by food processor Tomra Systems, using technology it developed to sift everything from rice grains to scallops.
“What the food guys did 30 years ago, I see us applying successfully into the mining business,” said John McGagh, head of innovation at Rio Tinto, one of the world’s top five copper miners by output. “Rice sorters can ¬colour-sort up to a million objects a second.”
When commodity prices started falling in late 2011, global miners responded by shutting pits, selling assets and laying off staff. Rio Tinto last year announced or completed sales of mines worth $US3.5 billion ($3.7bn), and is using the proceeds to repay debts.
With the obvious cutbacks ¬already implemented, companies are looking further afield for technology and ideas — to the military, aerospace and automotive industries.
For Lucas Dow, president of the BMA coal alliance in Australia run by BHP Billiton and Mitsubishi, this shift took him to a Toyota plant just outside Nagoya, Japan. Iron ore is vital to make steel, a key raw material for Toyota’s cars. But Mr Dow was there on other business: to find ways of making mines more efficient.
“We’re certainly looking outside of our own industry, and shamelessly stealing and implementing ideas where it is possible,” said Mr Dow, who is based in Brisbane.
He said he was taking on many ideas from Toyota, the company that rewrote the book on lean manufacturing with techniques like just-in-time inventory. He wants to run BMA’s mines using simple, repeatable processes that can flow without hitting bottlenecks, like a car assembly line.
At Goonyella Riverside, BMA’s largest mine, which produces steelmaking coal, an employee recently suggested setting up several Formula One-style pit stops around the mine site to improve refuelling of dump trucks, which haul 300 tonnes of raw ¬material at a time.
That change came after Mr Dow, praising the open communication between workers and management at Toyota, asked staff to provide feedback at the end of every shift.
BMA has also held discussions with supplier Komatsu, a major Japanese equipment company, about using data analytics to keep its machinery running longer.
BHP and Rio are using so-called big data to finetune maintenance schedules so that the engines in their $US5m trucks can be replaced just in time, rather than as prescribed by the manufacturers.
BMA has been looking at technology that enables mine managers to monitor truck engines remotely for problems — an idea borrowed from jet engine makers Rolls-Royce and Boeing.
At Fortescue Metals Group, which hopes to lift output from its Pilbara mines by 13 per cent through improving productivity, managers say a modular building style traditionally used in the oil and gas sector saved time and money in the construction of the company’s latest processing plant.
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au