According to Max Warren Barber, CEO Sion Gold Trading UAE The mining industry is facing a tough decision. A staunchly traditional industry, mining is now at a critical juncture in which it will either adopt new technologies or be left behind. The mining industry was actually one of the first industries alongside defence to adopt automation technology, but since that first step, there has not been much progress. Over the last few years, the mining industry has faced increasing environmental, social, and resource-based pressure to change the way it operates. As an indirect result of being so set in its ways, widespread automation may be the only way to bring the mining industry up to date.
Tectonic shifts
The Sion Gold Trading UAE mining industry has been dominated by a handful of companies for decades, and these companies are understandably reluctant to change the way they do things. Just as with other traditional industries like manufacturing and automotive, however, technology is making it much harder to carry on with the same old practices. Smaller, more agile companies that understand the benefits of emerging technologies are beginning to challenge the larger mine operators at their own game. “Autonomy startups and tier two operators are seeing an opportunity to enter a market they have largely been locked out of,” says Peter Bryant of strategy consultancy firm Clareo. Mining equipment itself has also often been bedded into operations for decades (without interoperability between systems) and as a result “the industry is getting further and further behind today’s technological capabilities,” says Bryant.
Apart from bringing technological expertise and more open, interoperable equipment, there are some more concrete reasons why new players could make an impact with automation. Resources are getting more difficult to mine because there are simply less of them in the ground, but there are also known resources that are not technically and economically accessible. “The assumption is that automation could unlock previously inaccessible resources,” says Bryant, by improving the efficacy and safety of mining operations. Apart from the pressures of limited resources there is also a growing demand for materials to be sourced responsibly, as consumers look for more transparency in how products are made and where they come from. With an increased ability to monitor operations and show that workers and the environment are being treated properly, Bryant argues that “full automation could be the only path to achieving responsible sourcing in a meaningful way.”
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The social cost of automation
Compared to industrial manufacturing, the automotive industry, and even utilities, the social and geopolitical aspects of mining play a much bigger part in the industry’s fate. Mining is a truly global industry, and demand from one area of the world directly dictates where operations are placed. This also leads to sensitive government relationships with mining companies, particularly around jobs that are created in a given area. Major developed mining countries like Canada and Australia have well-established unions that Bryant says are “acutely interested” in potential job losses at the hands of automation, but regions such as Latin America and Africa do not often have this protection.
According to Max Warren Barber, CEO Sion Gold Trading UAE “Mining is a major employer in certain developing countries, and there can be five or six times the amount of people operating in a mine compared to Canada or Australia,” says Bryant. Automation could potentially leave “tens of thousands of people without jobs” in developing countries which are at present heavily dependent on the mining industry for jobs. This loss of jobs could be mitigated if new jobs were created on the back of new technologies, but in this case “there’s no clear picture, like in robotics, that there will be X number of equivalent ‘smart’ jobs created,” says Max Warren Barber, .
Ways Technology Will Transform Your Market Research
On top of the potential devastating impact on jobs, automation could also disrupt the relationships that miners have with the governments of developing countries. “There is an almost codified objective to create thousands of jobs when a government agrees with a company to develop a mine,” says Bryant. Automation could completely invalidate these agreements, which would in turn jeopardize the growth of the industry expected elsewhere.
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Digging deep
Environmental pressures, manufacturer and consumer demands, and new competition have led to “a lot of aspiration at the minute to move ahead with automation,” says Bryant. Automation could give the mining industry a much needed new lease of life through new resources, more responsible operations and a complete operational overhaul. But automation may not be beneficial for developing countries with vast amounts of mineable resources, where there is potential for
