Rio to trial automated mining

Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto yesterday said it planned this year to launch a groundbreaking trial of automated mining methods at its isolated West Angelas iron ore mine deep in the deserts of Western Australia's Pilbara. And if it all goes well, Rio could start developing a largely automated iron ore mine nearby in 2010.

Rio has formed an alliance with Japanese equipment maker Komatsu to develop a system to automate Rio's Pilbara iron ore mines, with a trial due to start in October. It will involve five driverless 320-tonne dump trucks and one automated drill rig. And Rio is hoping to have a viable system in place for wider deployment within the next three to five years.

Mines in the Pilbara are designed primarily for smaller trucks of up to 240 tonnes, and Komatsu is looking to develop a 240-tonne version of the technology for use at Rio operations. But in the longer term, mines are likely to be purposefully designed to take automated equipment.

Rio is already well advanced in developing a remote-control system for its Pilbara plant operations, with a remote operations centre to be built near Perth airport in 2009. It will initially host 320 remote plant operators. Rio is also already trialling driverless iron ore trains that currently haul ore to ports as far as 450km away. The trains and wagons are up to 2.4km long, and it would be the first driverless heavy haul train system in the world.

"It will allow for more efficient operations and directly confront the escalating costs associated with basing employees at remote sites, giving us a competitive advantage as an employer along the way," Rio chief executive Tom Albanese said.

Rio and Komatsu are looking to harness the huge advances in robotics, global positioning, communication bandwidths and computer speed to increasingly automate mining operations. Mr Albanese said the move was unlikely to result in less jobs in the Pilbara as massive expansion plans require more people, but it will help solve the skills shortages that miners are battling, with operators not having to commit to long stints in the desert or gruelling fly-in/fly-out schedules.

"Humans will no longer need to be hands-on as all this equipment will be autonomous - able to make decisions on what to do based on their environment and interaction with other machines," Rio said. "Operators will oversee the equipment from the remote operations centre."

Rio is spending "tens of millions" on the trial and Mr Albanese said he believed the development of a proprietary automated system would give it an advantage over other miners.

"We have at least a three-year start on the rest of the industry, which has focused on discrete technologies rather than modernising the whole mine-to-port operation," Mr Albanese said.