David Giles, Chief Scientific Officer at MinEx CRC, details some of the major innovations helping to accelerate Australia’s mining industry.
Mining is a major contributor to Australia’s economy and amounts to around 75% of the country’s exports. With close to 80% of the country’s mineral deposits still unexplored, research, development and innovation in mining technologies and techniques is of crucial importance to ensure the industry continues to prosper long term.
Bringing together industry, government and research organisations, MinEx CRC is the world’s largest mineral exploration collaboration. To help Australia’s mining sector develop, MinEx CRC is focused on driving innovation in mining and bringing new mineral exploration technology to market.
The Innovation Platform spoke to David Giles, Chief Scientific Officer at MinEx CRC, to learn more about the collaboration.
How is innovation in mining technology helping to accelerate Australia’s mining industry? Can you provide some key examples?
Innovation is driving Australia’s mining sector in so many ways.
The mining industry is often viewed externally as being ‘old world’ and not particularly innovative. This is just not true. The history of the mining industry is one of constant innovation, which has driven productivity and continues to deliver safer and more environmentally responsible technologies and practices.
Productivity driven by innovation across the resources value chain is one of the main reasons we are now able to mine copper at average head grades approaching 0.5% (around half of the value of just 25 years ago). There are some recent relatively well-publicised examples, like the automation of mining transport infrastructure, digitisation of mine sites and the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into the analysis of mining and exploration data.
There are also less well-known gains that are being made across the board. One of my favourite examples is the photon assay technique for gold which is being delivered by Chrysos Corporation. The technique has taken an essential part of the mining game – determining the grade of ore – and made it cheaper, faster, and less hazardous. The technique was underpinned by fundamental research at CSIRO and then turned into innovation by recognising where and how it could have the greatest impact in the mining workflow.
How is mining technology helping Australia’s mining industry to prosper sustainably and adhere to high environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards?
Most innovations in the resources sector are now required to deliver broad ESG gains, in addition to cost efficiency and productivity of course.
A major area of focus is to maximise the mining industry’s contribution to the green energy transition. These contributions can happen in a few different ways; reducing the energy cost of key mining processes (e.g. crushing rocks to release the ore minerals requires huge amounts of energy, so even small gains in this area can deliver big reductions); replacing fossil fuel energy sources at mine and exploration sites with green energy sources; and providing the world with mineral products that are vital to the green energy transition (e.g. copper for electric wires; lithium, cobalt and graphite for batteries; rare earth elements for magnets).
At MinEx CRC, we are developing technology that we hope will make its own modest contribution across this spectrum. Our coiled tubing (CT) drilling technology is a good example. Benchmarked against conventional drilling technology in a field trial, the CT platform delivered 50% faster drilling, using 1/5th of the fuel and 1/7th of the water, on a drill site that was a quarter the size of the conventional site.
What have the last 12 months looked like for MinEx CRC? Can you pinpoint some key highlights?
The technologies that we are developing in MinEx CRC are maturing and moving toward being market ready; but they are each at a slightly different spot on that path and the best approach is going to be different for each technology.
The last twelve months have been about coming to grips with that transition from a great idea, even one that is well-tested in the lab and a controlled field environment, to a product or service that can deliver value to clients (within the framework of their current operations) and deliver a profit to the service provider. This will also be the focus of our final three-year phase of research projects starting now and finishing at the end of 2027. It’s a big job.
A recent highlight includes our CT drilling platform with 500m depth reach that has been licensed by Dig CT and is out there in the market drilling meters and delivering samples for clients. Our augmented reality drill core logging system, LogAR, has been licensed by CSIRO and we hope to see that incorporated in a publicly available package in the near future.
What are your near-term goals for the future?
We’re looking for ways to bring our technologies closer to market. In most cases, this involves identifying potential use cases and potential users and then working with them to design real-life field trials that will test the technology – from both a functional perspective (does it perform the task and will it survive in field conditions?) AND an operational perspective (can it, or how can it, be effectively incorporated in the workflow with minimal disruption?). For this type of tech, we’ve found that successful demonstration in the potential users’ specific scenarios is very important. We’re going to put a lot of effort into that.
What do you think is needed to enable Australia’s mining sector to accelerate to the levels needed to meet domestic and international demand for critical and strategic raw materials?
It’s a daunting task. I think we have many of the pieces in place.
There is no doubt that we have the resources — four billion years of Earth history have been kind to us. We have stable government and good bureaucracy, outstanding provision of exploration data through the Geological Surveys, high standards in terms of safety and environmental stewardship, and efficient mines. However, we have a couple of areas that we should be paying specific attention to.
One is mineral processing and beneficiation techniques aimed at turning stranded resources (including huge volumes of waste from historic mines that contain value products like rare earth elements and cobalt) into reserves. Another is developing downstream industries to turn those raw materials into higher-value products like batteries, magnets, and semiconductors.
Another is to discover and develop new mineral resources that deliver large volumes of critical minerals at relatively low cost (and low environmental impact). The best new deposits will be high grade (reversing that trend to lower grades that I mentioned earlier), easy to mine and efficient to process. Of course, we can’t order those deposits off the shelf. We have to explore for them. We have to open up new searches and develop the tools to operate effectively in that search. That is where MinEx CRC comes into play.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 21st edition of our quarterly publication.
