So what does this mean for demand?
In the UK each person accounts for the
use of about 400kg of steel a year while in
China usage is about 200kg per person.
But for the Chinese to attain living
standards comparable to those in the UK,
huge amounts of new infrastructure are
required and initially China’s demand is
expected to far exceed 400kg a head.
McGagh pointed to Taiwan, where steel
consumption peaked at about 1,000kg a
head before starting to fall.
Meeting this challenge will require a
change of mindset. ‘For 25 years until
2002 we faced declining prices for our
products because the industrial
consumption base in the west was seeing
very little growth,’ said McGagh.
‘If you’re facing continuing decreases
in your prices you’re not going to be
taking risks in terms of innovation and
new technology.’
But the time for innovation has
arrived so Rio Tinto is setting up a series
of specialist academic groups to rethink
and optimise different aspects of the
mining process.
Surface mining is one area ripe for
development. Rio Tinto hopes to almost
double its production, from 220 million
tonnes to 420 million tonnes a year, in its
Western Australia iron ore business. And
Radar scanning
technology from
RRS, above, is
helping detect
early signs of
danger in mines
across the
Southern
Hemisphere
the sheer scale of the proposed
operation, coupled with the fact that
fewer people want to live and work in
remote areas, is leading to unprece-
dented levels of automation.
From autonomous drilling
systems at the rock face, to fleets of
autonomous trucks and driverless
trains that will transport the mined
minerals to the shipment point, the
company is developing the building
blocks for an end-to-end automated
mining operation.
At the heart of this vision is a
master operating system under
development by a team of roboticists at
Sydney University. As well as
providing an ‘all-seeing’ link between
every aspect of the operation, it will
also enable Rio Tinto to carry out
monitoring and control from a remote
‘We need multiple, 100,000-tonnes-a-day,
double-shaft operations, whereas the best
today is 40,000 tonnes a day’ Jan de Beer, Reutech
operations centre some 1600km away
in Perth. All of these technologies will
be tested this year in a Western
Australia test-bed known simply as
Pit-A. By the end of this year, the
company hopes to control all its
Pilbara operations from Perth.
Landslips are a serious danger in
open-cast mines, particularly as they
get deeper, and since the mine of the
future will still require human
workers, technology can help
improve safety.
An increasingly popular technique
MINE OF THE FUTURE
is the use of radar scanning systems to
detect potentially dangerous earth
movements. For instance, the
movement and surveying radar
developed by South African firm
Reutech Radar Systems will constantly
monitor vast areas of a rock face and
provide an early warning of
geotechnical weakness or movement
long before it can be detected by the
human eye.
Jan de Beer, Reutech’s head of
mining, told The Engineer that the
system will detect movements of less
than a millimetre in 900m by 600m
sections of slope face.
Mining the resources that lie deeper
beneath the ground such as copper, for
which demand is rocketing, presents
an even trickier set of engineering
challenges. ‘Over the next 20 years we
have to open the next tier of copper
deposits and these are up to 2km deep
underground,’ said McGagh. ‘We’re
looking heavily at the next
technological breakthroughs in the
rapid development of mega
underground copper deposits. We need
to think about multiple,100,000-tonnes-
a-day, double-shaft operations whereas
the best today is 40,000 tonnes a day.’
Much of the research in this area is
being carried out by a group of earth
science specialists at Imperial College
London. Working with £6m of Rio Tinto
23
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