Transforming the future mine

The Minerals Down Under Flagship is working with industry and partners in the Australian innovation system to help address Australia’s key national challenges and opportunities in the minerals domain. An area of focus for the Flagship’s research is transforming the future mine.

• 20 April 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• The challenges
• Our goal

The challenges

Australia's high-grade deposits are being rapidly depleted and the Australian mining industry is facing the challenge of declining grades.

The long-term consequence of this trend to lower grades and challenging terrain is that the surface mines of the future will be bigger, while underground mines will often be deeper, hotter, and will suffer higher in-situ rock stress.

The industry is also facing a number of other long-term challenges, such as the remote location and isolation of mines, limited human resources and difficult mining conditions. In addition, there is a growing need to reduce the mining environmental footprint.

To meet these challenges, a new generation of cost-effective and often remotely operated mining technologies needs to be developed to help convert currently sub-economic resources into reserves and improve the profitability of existing low-grade reserves while improving mine safety and reducing the mining footprint.

Our goal

Minerals Down Under mining research will help transform the Australian mining industry by developing and applying the next generation of safe, geologically intelligent mining and drilling systems that are automated and/or controlled via secure internet connection.

By 2030, new mining equipment and control systems will be operating to reduce the cost of mining, to access ore that was otherwise not economic, and to extract and remove people from hazardous areas of mining activities.

The Australian mining technology and services sector (MTS) will be expanded to exploit the new mining technology and deliver it to market.

Three research streams have been developed to achieve our goals.

Each stream is made up of a series of integrated research projects focused on specific resource challenges:

• Enhancing knowledge from drilling
• Geologically intelligent surface mining
• Non-entry underground mining.

Read more about them in the following pages.