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Deploying Artificial Intelligence To Help Fill The Short-Term Essential Minerals Gap
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Deploying Artificial Intelligence To Help Fill The Short-Term Essential Minerals Gap
MARIE GABRIELLE LAGUNA
sofTware-based sysTems ThaT use daTa inpuTs To decide for themselves or to assist people in making decisions are referred to as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The use of AI will be crucial to the survival of businesses of all sizes and in all industries within a few years.
Apart from growing environmental challenges, there are significant energy security issues in many parts of the world. This is taking place in the backdrop of rising energy costs, partly as a result of supply chain issues influenced by the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. In Europe, where natural gas is heavily used for heating and cooking as well as the production of electricity, this effect is amplified. Thus, the market becomes more susceptible to supply shortages. Governments around the world are being compelled to improve their domestic resilience and energy security through the provision of clean energy in order to protect consumers from significant financial effects.
Additionally, this is hastening a change in energy production to help limit global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Nevertheless, the demand for minerals - particularly vital minerals like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and graphite - is anticipated to rise significantly because of the energy tran-
sition. Predictions state that by 2040, there will be a four-fold increase in the number of key minerals needed for renewable energy technology.
For the mining sector, this is a breakthrough. However, the industry must develop new strategies to boost productivity and efficiency in order to meet rising demand and to close the supply gap.
In order to maintain its current permits and obtain new ones, the mining sector will also need to keep its environmental and climate footprints under stringent control.
The Landscape for Mining Businesses Using Artificial Intelligence
In the mining sector, AI is more crucial than ever due to declining yields and adverse environments. Every stage of the mining value chain - from exploration to extraction, processing, and even marketing - can be significantly impacted by AI.
With the potential to maximize ore processing, AI is making systems smarter and capable of extracting more value from already-existing resources. AI can even benefit the environment by improving the remote targeting of rich mining resources. This results in the reduced need for pointless excavation which can be extremely harmful to the environment.
The Effects Data May Have
Every mineral processing facility has inefficiencies because of the intrinsic geological variability of the ore that these facilities deal with - irrespective of whether such a facility processes 50,000 ounces of gold annually or 400,000 tons of copper annually.
Even with mineral processing facilities working towards increasing productivity, the mining sector faces a number of difficulties including growing costs, fluctuating commodity prices, and variability in operating procedures. Concerning the effect of mining on natural resources, there is another troubling factor. Roughly 3 billion tons of ore are extracted annually and the mining sector accounts for 10% of the energy utilized globally. Furthermore, mining operations utilize over 4 billion cubic meters of water annually. The increasing demand for minerals and metals will only exacerbate the effect on our natural resources unless we take a dramatically different and climate-smart approach.
Miners use numerous systems and databases to manage their processes in an effort to boost efficiency. However, the collected data remains vastly underutilized in a significant number of cases. According to the findings of recent McKinsey studies, mining corporations only utilize less than 1% of the data collected by their equipment and tools. As a result, many petabytes of data are not utilized for operational decision-making and instead languish in silos.
In the coming years, digitization may help close the gap between the supply and demand of essential minerals. A 3% to 5% boost in metal recovery utilizing AI applications would increase our potential to provide an extra 450,000 tons of copper annually, valued at $3.2 billion, according to the earlier estimates for copper mine production.
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Mining executives are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology to plan for future operations.
Digital twins, autonomous systems, and deep learning neural networks are a few of the technologies that reveal hidden correlations between various process parameters to reveal hidden insights into process performance.
This is especially useful for the mining industry due to the dynamic nature of its processes, the challenging working environment that causes data loss and data quality problems, and the inherent geological uncertainty linked to different ores.
When data is fully utilized, the deployment of an integrated physics-informed machine learning model (scientific AI) through a realtime software environment can uncover concealed insights, provide superior forecasts, and encourage efficiency improvements through real-time optimization.
Scientific AI-driven software technologies can improve organizations' decision-making processes to deliver more significant business outcomes when properly integrated into workflows that traditionally require human intelligence. It is important to note, however,
that there is no one-size-fits-all technological solution to solve every industry challenge. The improvements in communication are a fantastic illustration of how digitization may increase productivity. About 53% of the
energy consumed in mines is used in "the process of crushing and grinding ore." Using AI technologies for real-time monitoring and mill prediction has already demonstrated the potential to boost throughput while lowering 16 | SKILLINGS MINING REVIEW December 2022 energy consumption. This is achieved by safely pushing equipment to its maximum operational capacity.
Effect of Efficiency on the Supply of Essential Minerals
Efficiency gains have a big impact on the mining industry. As an example, copper is one of the most widely used metals in the world with demand coming from a variety of sectors including renewable energy and building.
The top 20 copper mines in the world today have an annual production capacity of about 9 million tons.
In 2020, this accounted for 44% of global copper production. However, given that the demand is expected to rise by 31% between 2020 and 2030, this present source of supply simply won't be enough.
In the coming years, digitization may help close the gap between the supply and demand of essential minerals. A 3% to 5% boost in metal recovery utilizing AI applications would increase our potential to provide an extra 450,000 tons of copper annually, valued at $3.2 billion, according to the earlier estimates for copper mine production.
This is the equivalent of the yearly output capacity of Peru's Las Bambas Mine - one of the world's top eight copper producers.
Improvements like these give an already strangled industry some breathing room, especially in light of the fact that "the average mine takes 15 years to bring into production." Millions of tons of minerals, including essential minerals, are already needed to support a sizable transition to renewable energy for a low-carbon future.
The mining sector can boost productivity, cut waste, and avoid using energy from non-renewable resources by implementing next-generation AI-based software technologies such as scientific AI.
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