The future of sustainable mining

Modern society rightly expects the mining industry to make a positive contribution to socio-economic development while reducing its environmental footprint. At Anglo American, this is a challenge that we are determined to meet.

Tyler Mitchelson, CEO, Anglo American Metallurgical Coal

Mining must transform in the decades ahead, starting now.

At Anglo American, we are working across our global business to transform the nature of mining through FutureSmart MiningTM – our innovation-led approach to sustainable mining.

Our three key pillars of technology, sustainability and digitalisation are shifting the way we source, mine, process, move and market our products – and how our stakeholders experience our business. It is about transforming our physical and societal footprint.

And where a solution doesn’t yet exist, we are challenging ourselves to work with our partners to develop them, and in doing so, disrupt some of our more traditional ways of working.

We are questioning ‘accepted knowledge’ about our practices and controls and focusing on rapidly emerging technology to reimagine mining in our business. This work is essential to making our operations more sustainable, safe and productive. This work is essential to making our operations more sustainable, safe and productive.

In our metallurgical coal business based in Queensland, we are establishing a Met Coal Analytics Centre in our Brisbane office. We are bringing together operational, engineering and data science experts to look at major challenges and opportunities for the future of our mines.

This will be achieved by extracting millions of data files from structures, equipment and machinery across our operations into one centre, and analysing them to provide insights that will improve the safety and operational effectiveness of our mines.

As the largest underground metallurgical coal miner in Australia, we are uniquely positioned to leverage our own data and technology to transform the way we analyse data to drive safer operations, better decisions and achieve mining excellence.

While this is not new, and many companies in our industry are well advanced in harnessing data science opportunities, our scale in underground coal mining here in Queensland enables us to focus on addressing specific challenges in an underground coal environment.

This has been supported by our work in recent years to digitise our underground mines in the Bowen Basin, and our continued pursuit of underground automation and remote operation.

Over the last few years we worked with a manufacturing partner to launch Australia's first electronic tablet device certified for use in underground coal mines. We have now rolled them out across our sites, as part of our drive to digitise our operations.

We have continued to increase the capability of these devices as we digitise more of our work processes and enhance our ability to monitor and analyse data in real time.

Construction of our underground Aquila project is currently underway near Middlemount in Central Queensland, and on track for first longwall production of premium quality hard coking coal in early 2022. The mine will showcase our innovation-led approach to sustainable mining, with a remote operating centre on the surface of the mine, promixity detection systems underground to alert machine operators to pedestrians, and the continued digitisation of our operations, including electronic tablets.

But the introduction of new technology into the underground environment is not without its challenges. It takes time and resources to engineer and certify any device as 'intrinsically safe'. We are fortunate to be able to scale the development of new technologies across our operations, as we continue to pursue digitisation and our new analytics centre.

In addition to digitising our mines, we are continuing our pursuit of automation and remote operation, as this offers the most significant opportunity to make a step change in mining safety performance.

Removing people from potential harm is the best way to improve safety in mining and we are committed to making this happen. While automation has been a priority for us for many years now, we are further bolstering our automation and remote operation plans.

But this is work that cannot be done alone.

It’s essential mining companies, contractors and government organisations integrate their work and collaborate to achieve an industry that is safer, more efficient and one that is responding to societal expectations.

To this end, we have developed a Sustainable Mining Plan that is integral to our FutureSmart MiningTM approach. It will foster innovation and deliver step change results across the entire mining value chain, from mineral discovery right through to marketing. This strategy will also transform our whole business and deliver value to stakeholders.

Our Sustainable Mining Plan is built around three global sustainability pillars – trusted corporate leader, thriving communities and healthy environment.

These pillars are deliberately ambitious and designed to challenge us to lead and innovate and to meet our target of net zero emissions across all our operations by 2040. Modern society rightly expects the mining industry to make a positive contribution to socio-economic development while reducing its environmental footprint.

At Anglo American, this is a challenge that we are determined to meet. 