Suits and Boots | The Sustainable Business Podcast

From Earth to Orbit | Exploring the Tech Transforming Mining

• TDi Sustainability • Season 1 • Episode 15

Share episode

Technological innovations including advancements in AI, automation and data analytics are irreversibly changing the mining sector. In this special edition episode in advance of the Resourcing Tomorrow event in London this December, our speakers  discuss the technological applications that are revolutionising exploration, resource extraction, processing and mine management to enhance efficiency, safety and sustainability across the value chain. 

The speakers are:

  • Dr Craig Brown - Director of Investment at the UK Space Agency
  • Mark O’Brien, General Manager - Digital Technology and Innovation at CITIC Pacific Mining
  • Assheton Stewart Carter (host) - Executive Chair, TDi Sustainability

Craig leads the UK Space Agency’s innovation, investment and commercialisation activities, forging relationships with space investors, suppliers and customers to bring new investment and revenue into the sector. 

CITIC Pacific Mining is Australia’s largest magnetite mining and processing operation. As well as his role in digital tech and innovation at CITIC, Mark O’Brien is also chair of the Global Mining Guidelines Board of Directors, which brings mining sector stakeholders together to work on progressing the industry. Mark is also currently undertaking research on AI and machine ethics. 

This episode is part of the TDi Sustainability special series of podcasts produced in advance of the 2025 Resourcing Tomorrow event that will take place in London between 2-4 December. Find out more about the event>




UNKNOWN:

🎵🎵

SPEAKER_02:

And welcome to this special edition of Suits and Boots, the TDI podcast series in conjunction with Resourcing Tomorrow. In this series, speakers at this year's Resourcing Tomorrow event discuss some of the key themes that will be covered at the conference. I'm Ashen Stuart-Carter, Executive Chair at TDI. Today's episode is on tech revolution, AI data and innovation transforming mining. Technological innovations, including advancements in AI automation and data analytics are a reversible change in the mining sector. In this episode, our speakers will discuss the technological applications that are revolutionising exploration, resource extraction, processing and mine management, with the promise of greater efficiency, mine site safety and sustainability across the value chain. I'm delighted to be joined today for this discussion by Dr Craig Brown and Mark O'Brien, who bring two different perspectives from what looks like two very different industries, space and large-scale magnetite mining, but both share a focus on innovation Thank you very much. City Pacific Mining is Australia's largest magnetite mining and processing operation. And as well as his role in digital tech and innovation at City, Mark O'Brien has also chaired the Global Mining Guidelines Board of Directors, which brings mining sector stakeholders together to work on progressing the industry. Mark is also currently undertaking research on AI and machine ethics. I've really not done justice to both of your careers, which from just little research are revealed as being impressively rich and are a topic in themselves. but I want to make use of the little time we have to have our audience here directly from you both and to get a glimpse of the conversations that will be had at Resourcing tomorrow. Craig and Mark, a very warm welcome. I think it's fair to say that many people get excited about innovation or at least the idea of it. I know I do. It's always the best attended sessions at conferences and having innovation in your job title sets you out as creative and as an engineer, things that many of us aspire to be. But, and I don't think this is a controversial thing to say. Many of these fans of innovation would associate it with the tech sector, the digital economy, in medicines and healthcare, and other more consumer experience sectors, but not so much in the mining sector. A small personal anecdote. When I was a postdoc researcher in the late 90s, I was part of a project working on tech innovation and transfer in mining. And more recently, at TDI, we completed a project looking at technology transfer in the DR Congo. Some of the key findings The findings of this, of the first study, was that really, other than Newmont in the 1960s, who developed the process to capture invisible gold, the gold from very small distributions of the metal in large quantities of rock, and thereby opening up the rich gold field at the Carlin Trend in Nevada, most innovations in this sector have been making things a little bit faster, a little bit more accurate, but nothing really fundamental, nothing really that changed the fundamentals of mining, nothing really disrupted And that might be perfectly an okay thing. Incremental change, progressing in the right direction, is often more durable and transformative, just a bit slower than people nowadays expect. The second project on technology transformer DRC affirmed what is evident about innovation globally today, that it is often clustered and concentrated and stubbornly difficult to transfer, especially within the context of geopolitical tensions and the importance of IP in certain innovation is still a people's business because we need the environment to bounce ideas off each other and ecosystem to turn those into application so perhaps two themes here to start our conversation first what is innovation in mining or is it innovations applied to mining and second if we agree that this is a common good how can it be transferred so really the opening question here is what are some of the recent examples of innovation that you've seen at captral imagination and you can help explain to us and explain to our audience how this is going to be transformative. Maybe I'll start with Mark.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, look, I think, you know, traditionally with mining, a lot of people have fairly stereotypical thoughts around what mining looks like and what is involved. And, you know, in some respects, that's probably true. We still dig dirt and do some things that are fundamentally quite simple in some respects. But I think we have seen actually quite a lot of innovation creeping in and some of it pretty fast because I think one of the biggest things that has become and I've seen this definitely over the last decade or so in particular is just that we've been collecting data in various forms for a long time but in recent times we've been collecting a lot of data and not really necessarily always making good use of it but we've begun to see that now really becoming a key thing in the mining industry where we are working hard to optimise what we're do it's a very capital intensive industry and it's a pretty competitive industry and of course with some of the fluctuations we're seeing in in various commodities it you know different points for different commodities it becomes a very tight game of making a profit or not and so you know i think definitely there's been a lot of work happening around um certain aspects of the industry anyway which which really have involved making better use of data figuring out how to optimize things uh more cleverly uh you know right down into some of the processing stuff but um right across the board, automation, autonomous mining. There's been a lot of really good stuff there. And I think also a lot of stuff that probably isn't always visible. I talk to a lot of mining companies and they often say, oh, we haven't really got into AI just yet. But actually, I always challenge them and say, I think you're probably a lot deeper in AI than you think because a lot of your vendors are building products that are utilizing AI technologies to improve what they're offering and how they're doing what they do. So yeah, I'm actually fairly optimistic about the mining industry and its use of technology and some of the innovation coming in. And I think we've got a lot of pressures on us at the moment to do a lot better. We obviously are a big carbon producer and that is putting a lot of pressure on us to lift our game as we seek to meet certain targets by certain dates. And some of that looks very difficult. And we've really got to rethink the way we do a lot of what we do to meet that stuff or we start to lose social license, and in some cases, maybe even become unprofitable, depending on how people begin to perceive our relative goodness in terms of the way that we deal with the decarbonization exercise. So yeah, I mean, I think at points we are slow and not always seem to be quick to change, but I'm also encouraged by the fact that I see a lot of clever people in the industry trying to help us do things a lot better.

SPEAKER_02:

You brought up a few things there, some which I've noted down to do discuss a little later but I can see especially for like a junior miner and always conscious about costs and always trying to raise the next round of capital getting into the unknown into AI can seem a little daunting and maybe some way you don't want to step so what are what are some of these examples of these AI technologies that are useful you think you mentioned I think in the 2023 international mining article that there'll be a sizable impact from mining for Could you give us a

SPEAKER_01:

couple of examples? You know, if I look at my own company, we pieced together several data sets a little while ago to get a mine-to-mill kind of model up because, you know, we wanted to know what does a good day look like in our mining operation. We're a magnetite miner, so we have an enormous amount of processing that's required for us to produce our product. And so really taking a look at the end-to-end of mine planning all the way from when we plan a blast all the way through to what comes out of the mill, you know, piecing all that data together and then beginning to sort of figure out, okay, okay, well, what makes for a good day in our operation? Those are all, you know, actually pretty value-adding exercises and didn't come at huge cost. You know, to me, that's actually one of the really great things about AI is that, you know, playing around and experimenting is relatively cheap. Now, productionizing stuff and actually putting it into your operation in a serious way, well, there are some costs to that, and that's where it gets a little more interesting for us generally because, you know, that sometimes means changing the process and looking at other things like that and building trust in some of these tools. But that's often not a technology problem, that's a people problem. But definitely, you know, I think most mining companies have every reason to play around with this stuff because it's not a huge entry bar to get into playing around.

SPEAKER_02:

That's great. It sounds like it holds a lot of promise and we'll come back to your particular projects, Sino-Ion, in a little while. But Craig, I'd like to continue with that theme on Datra and AI. But before you reflect on that a little bit, I think some of our audience would be really interested to hear what is the UK Space Agency? Could you give us a minute off and then we can go into the work we're doing on AI and some of the observation science?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, of course. So really glad to join you for today's conversation. It's a really interesting topic. And as you might imagine, I'm not a minor. I've got some experience of projects that are related to the sector. But back to your question on what is the UK Space Agency. So it's the bit of UK government that's responsible for supporting the UK's space sector. It's quite a significant sector within the UK economy. We actually underpin a whole 16%, 1.6% of the UK's GDP. If you look at the number of kind of bits of the economy that are reliant on something in space at some point. So it's a really significant contributor to to the UK economy, and that includes lots of different adjacent parts like mining, but also things like our energy systems. Telecommunications, of course, is a really important aspect of the UK economy that's underpinned by space. We often think of space as our hidden utility, where most people just have no idea, really, how many times they'll be using a satellite in the course of a day, but it's many dozens of times, actually. And so the UK Space Agency's job is to make sure that we have the right policies in place to make sure that the sector is everything that it can be, but also to provide significant amounts of funding, either through national programs or through the European Space Agency, of which we are a member state. And that money that flows through either those national programs or the European Space Agency helps support innovation, new developments of products and services or applications that use satellites across a range of different industries, including mining. Superb. And

SPEAKER_02:

your work has touched on AI or AI is central to it. I think there is a project which is using machine learning based change detection to, I guess, enhance the observation qualities and skills of these satellites. Can you explain a little bit about that and, you know, understanding you're not a miner, but how this sort of data can actually help the mining industry?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, of course. So, gosh, I remember back maybe sort of like eight, to 10 years ago, everybody was talking about big data and how our economy was going to be a big data economy and underpinned by all of these massive data sets. And of course, how do you manage these big data sets became the kind of question of the day. And since then, of course, AI is really having its day, isn't it? And really, that's one of the many tools that we will be using to manage some of these massive data sets as we look to extract as much useful information out of these data sets for a range of different applications. AI is a real key theme within the space sector at the moment. Almost 80%, I would hazard a guess, of our projects kind of involve AI on some level. And it could be, you know, you've mentioned kind of change detection applications where we say, for argument's sake, are taking lots of imagery from satellites in orbit, trying to understand the way in which things are changing down on Earth. Traditionally, that would have required a huge amount of manual interest and computer processing to try and understand how images change from one image to another. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really speeds that up. And as you can imagine, the value of data and information is almost inversely proportional to the time it takes to go from the satellite to the user. So the quicker we can analyze these images and understand what those images mean and really derive or extract as much insight as possible from those images as possible and as quickly as possible, the better. And artificial intelligence is a tool that really helps us do that. I would also say that one of the big benefits of AI, particularly things like agentic AI, which is where you can design specific AI tools for a specific purpose, which then kind of takes some decisions in the loop, or even... sort of tools like ChatGPT and generative AI, a lot of the benefit that these tools bring to the table is to allow people who don't have a PhD in a topic to suddenly use these tools. I mean, traditionally, it was quite difficult to kind of get access to these tools and to learn how to use them. But AI really offers kind of the layperson really access to some of these tools and the power that these tools have to offer for business. And that is really going to be transformative, I think, to all sorts of sectors.

SPEAKER_02:

So we've got a better idea, I think, of what some of these exciting innovations are. And they seem to be coming together as well. So we have the AI, which is enhancing the capabilities of the satellite imagery. We have AI on the site. And what I'd like to go through to next is why we should care about these innovations. Whose lives is it going to improve and whose businesses is it going

SPEAKER_01:

to improve? There's been a number of companies that have introduced satellite based technologies using machine learning to to monitor tailings facilities and you know we've seen obviously a handful of catastrophic failures of tailing stands which have been just absolutely terrible in terms of their impact and so you know this is a this is a tremendously excellent example of the ways in which we can use uh some of these technologies not just to protect miners and uh mining facilities but in in some cases the the local communities as well uh so i think you know there's some some some excellent examples like that, that really do show, you know, just how valuable some of this stuff is. And in one sense, it's not something that people see a lot of, you know, it's a kind of a background sort of thing. I often use the phrase AI as infrastructure, where you don't really see it anymore, it just does stuff for you. And I think that's one of the things that I think is really powerful about a lot of these examples. A lot of people would not be exposed to it necessarily, but actually the AI is behind the scenes doing some really fantastic work.

SPEAKER_00:

And satellites really do come into their own when you're dealing in kind of remote environments. And of course, a lot of mining activity is just that. So where kind of traditional terrestrial ground infrastructure is just really expensive to roll out or difficult to roll out due to the geography or the terrain, then doing things over satellite really does kind of add a huge amount of benefit. So even things like communicating into remote regions, that can be really expensive and difficult to set up a whole terrestrial kind of mobile phone system out into the middle of nowhere, whereas you can introduce new telecommunication systems that kind of go over satellite for much better costs. And so, yeah, remote use of satellite systems, I think, is a real good example of where it kind of benefits the mining sector just because of the geography of the situation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that's a great point, Craig. I mean, I I personally think that the advent of high-speed communications to remote areas through satellite, I mean, we've been very lucky even here in Australia where we've got pretty good fibre infrastructure to many places. And I think that in itself has facilitated a lot of excellent ability for us to use data more effectively and in near real-time kind of ways to support decision-making. As we discovered recently, the ability to tap into satellites when everything else is dead in the water is a hugely positive thing. And I think, as you said, I do know of a number of mining companies who are operating in extreme remote situations where the satellite is the only thing they've got available, but it's hugely powerful because the amount of data and the speeds now really allow them to do pretty much everything that others are doing in some of the strangest places. So it's a very exciting time, I think, on the whole.

SPEAKER_00:

Fundamentally, a lot of this comes down to economic advantage and some of the earlier conversation around why bother innovating. I mean, in the end, it's the companies that kind of find new ways of doing things that can get that economic advantage and ultimately be successful in the market. And being able to use some of these kind of new tools that are coming through from sectors such as the space sector can really give a company that economic advantage to beat its competition. And of course, one of the beautiful things about the space sector over the last decade is that it's gone through such a massive transition where it has been innovating at pace. The cost of launch has now come down by a factor of 100 over the last couple of decades, which means it's so much more economic to put things into orbit. And as a result, the services that are offered now are much more affordable and open to companies, small as well as big. And as a result of that, it really does open up such a large economic opportunity for companies right the way up the value chain.

SPEAKER_02:

So I want to touch on why we should care. Why should we bother innovating? You know, when I was looking at innovation in the past, there's always this adage that there's a solution looking for a problem or a problem looking for a solution. Have we become too intrigued by the innovation and the tech itself? Or are there actually, is there a business case here for how this can actually improve economic fundamentals of mining. Can you make the case for the fundamentals of how this can improve the fundamentals of mining, many of these innovations that you've been talking about?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think I'm a firm believer that if you're not innovating, your competitors are. And so it's really important that you never stop thinking about how to improve. You know, people used to say that if it's not broken, don't fix it. I say if it's not broken, probably try and make it better still because your competitors are probably doing just that. I think some of the things, of course, that are changing in time aren't just kind of technical, but they're also regulatory. And so we've seen over the course of the last few decades a much better and correct focus on environmental regulation. And of course, that means that companies in a lot of different sectors have to change the way in which they operate, in which they behave. And that social responsibility and environmental responsibility starts to force companies to do things in a different and better way. And some of the innovations that we've seen come through on the space side can really assist companies across lots of different industries to adhere better to those regulations and responsibilities. So for example, monitoring emissions remotely remotely or monitoring the way in which land use is changing over time. And of course, monitoring kind of criminal behaviour, so either illegal land mining or illegal deforestation. Those sorts of things can be monitored much more easily remotely from satellites than by going out on the ground, which can be very expensive and in many cases very dangerous when it comes to illegal activity. And so we at the Space Agency have supported a number of different projects over the years to use satellites in such a way that it supports companies who have to do things differently as a result of new regulations coming in.

SPEAKER_02:

Got it. So the importance of surveillance and how that can be a positive for the regulator of the downstream companies and for the mining companies themselves. Mark, how about some more operational benefits? What are the clear business case, for example, through the use of autonomous vehicles that you can make to senior management in your company and other companies you work with for at some of the technology advancements?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, look, I think the fundamental point that you sort of raised in your question is a key one. You know, I think that there is that shiny object syndrome that unfortunately is out there. AI is just a fantastic magnet for hype and froth and bubble and people saying stupid things. And so I think... we are at a point where people have to sort of, I think, focus on, you know, what are the problems we're trying to solve? And, you know, is AI even the best solution for some of those problems? Sometimes there are other solutions that are maybe more cost effective and smarter solutions. And, you know, this I think is one of the things I like about mining in general is that mining is a very pragmatic industry. We are very capital intensive. We have very long life cycle of investment. And so people coming in with bright ideas aren't always, you know, received super well, but people want to sort of test it out a bit, understand, you know, if you are asking us to change what we're doing here or what the model on which this mine was designed, does this actually make sense? And for some places, you know, for certain types of mines, small gold miner, for instance, you know, having an autonomous fleet just probably doesn't make sense unless they've got some incredibly long life of mine or some other factors that play in. If you're a mining company like us and other iron ore miners where you move huge amounts of material every year, then it does start to make sense. And you have to cost it up and do the numbers and sort of figure out how it stacks up. With autonomy, we always say it forces you to really look at your processes and understand what you're doing clearly. If you automate a bad process, all you do is you get worse quicker. So really, you've got to stop and take a hard look at what you're doing and then figure out where do these tools actually help you out. But I think we... We are sort of an interesting inflection point with AI in particular because I think we're sort of at a bit of a peak of, maybe it's got more to go, I don't know, of sort of hyperbole and exaggeration. And I'm kind of in the unique position of having studied AI back in the 80s in part of my undergrad degree and having seen AI be huge and then disappear. And it disappeared back then because of over-promise and under-delivery, all the funding dropped. up and then it popped back up again in the 2000s again with a lot of you know quietly and then built speed up and now you know if you want to sell anything just throw AI on the label and you know all as well and I think that's a problem because what it means is that you know I came across a great little phrase recently and I think it sums up this nicely which is AI is a tool it's not a strategy it's a tool and you know part of what we need to do is figure out how do we use this tool and And really, even when we say AI, we're being a bit disingenuous because AI isn't a single thing. In reality, it's a bunch of different techniques that solve different types of problems. And so even then, you've got to figure out, well, what type of approach will solve certain kinds of problems that I'm confronted with and then try and figure it out. Whereas a lot of the hype sort of suggests that everything's a nail and we're just running around with our hammer fixing it all. And I think that's just going to lead to some disappointment along the way. I think there'll be people lose money on some crazy investments. And I think, you know, when you talk about the energy situation, even now we're being starting to see surface in the news reports, a lot of people raising concerns about the energy requirements for some of these AI tools, especially the large language models, the water requirements for cooling of data centers. These are some amazing requirements to provide this tool. And I think at some point, at some point, we're going to have to ask ourselves is this the most cost-effective tool to solve certain problems? Yes, it's very good at a lot of things, but in some instances, it may be something that actually just doesn't make sense to apply to certain problems. And a lot of people are putting in pretty silly prompts and questions to their chat GPT or whatever. And the cost of retrieving those responses is pretty incredible. At the moment, being underwritten by a lot of investors pouring money into these things, but in the long term, that's unsustainable. So I guess it's going to be an interesting... future. But right now, I think, yeah, we definitely can make the case that in a lot of instances, if for the right problems, AI is a very good solution. I think that's a great segue

SPEAKER_02:

to a kind of larger point I wanted to discuss and get your reflections on is, you know, there are developments, sustainable development in particular is always about trade-off. There's going to be some winners and some losers. And our goal, I guess, collectively is to reduce those trade-offs. But, you know, when I started in mining, the promise of mining as a contributor to development, that it's going to create jobs locally and obviously drive foreign exchange earnings as well. But with the innovation technologies and mining, as you said, has always been capital intensive, but it's now becoming much more technologically driven. That promise seems to be more difficult to make. And if you read the narratives of the International Mining Associations, it's more about it contributing to a clean energy transition than it is about local benefits. So how is mining going to win its social license to operate, its license to operate, if these innovations seem to be at odds with the idea of driving national and local economies?

SPEAKER_00:

I think it's a question that transcends just this one sector, actually, is how are we going to deal with a new economy enabled by some of these new tools that offer massive efficiencies and massive change in the way in which businesses operate. But the risk is, of course, at the expense of jobs. I think it's not just a mining sector thing. It's something that we're seeing across many parts of our economy. And it's a tale as old as time when we look back at the different technology curves that we've been through since the Industrial Revolution. It does absolutely transform the way in which careers and jobs are in society. I think one of the biggest and most interesting things about the transition of careers around AI is perhaps for the first time we're seeing white-collar jobs actually risk, not just blue-collar jobs and heavy industry jobs at risk by tools such as AI. You're talking about AI replacing perhaps the sort of jobs that people in junior legal professionals would be doing as part of their training to become solicitors and lawyers, for example. And so we're seeing this as a really difficult policy question, actually, for government trying to understand the kind of big implications of this. And so I can't really speak specifically to the mining example, but I will say that it's something that transcends just this one sector and is of concern actually for governments around the world as they're trying to manage their economies.

SPEAKER_02:

And of course, that's right. It crosses all economic boundaries. But Mark, an outstanding feature of mining when it's looking to win a license to operate is that it's physically very visible and often disruptive. And so... making the case becomes more and more difficult if you can't see direct benefits. But how do you approach this with your kind of two hats on or three hats on, I guess, in your industry association hat, your technological hat and your business and operating hat?

SPEAKER_01:

You're right. The promise, the local promise for a lot of budding economies in Africa or the LATAM region with mining was always jobs and local economic development. and money going back into communities. From what I can see, I think there is a transition going where that is still happening. It's just happening in a slightly different way. If you take a look at this, there's certainly been some mining in Africa where they've tried to introduce autonomy and some of that, and you would think, oh, hang on, that's taking jobs. But actually, it's really been different types of jobs that has opened up the way forward for us. So instead of relatively unsafe, very manual jobs of people you know laboring type work you know what we're seeing in some places is actually the jobs are evolving into higher level roles which are safer cleaner you know often require different levels of education and training and in a lot of ways um you know much much even more positive in many respects for for their communities because of because of the safer sort of operating environment for people that you know when i was in chile last year and uh just visiting uh some of Codelco's work. And it was really, it was cool to see how they, you know, they've transitioned to remote operating centers and whatnot into the local communities. They've got a lot of young people in there doing remote operations out of these centers. A lot of very smart people experimenting and looking at the data and figuring out ways to really leverage that to improve their operation. And so I think, you know, you're going to see more and more of that. But I think that ultimately is better for those communities. And I think we're seeing some good things happen on that front.

SPEAKER_02:

That's great. And actually, that touched on another topic I wanted to discuss with you both, which is on the ethics of new technology and AI and data in particular. And technology transfer is one of those. As I mentioned at the beginning, innovation, especially in AI, seems to be concentrated in a few large companies' hands, mostly in China. and the US if we want to transfer this technology so it benefits communities where mining takes place. How are we going to go about it? What are the ethics around the governance of data? How do we transfer it? Who owns it? And who gets access to it? And I know, Mark, you're doing a PhD on this, and of course this is central to your work as well, Craig. Interesting to hear your reflections, perhaps starting with Craig.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, it's very central to the UK government's kind of approach and kind of big question around the use of AI in the modern economy. Of course, we have a number of laws and bits of legislation in place that govern the way in which our data, particularly personal data, is used. And of course, there are some big kind of questions currently being worked through around copyright and the different types of training data that's usable by different AI models. I will say that A lot of this is a work in progress. It's not an easy thing to settle, but I don't think it's a controversial thing to say that everyone in government that I've spoken to certainly wants to ensure that the new world, which is quite likely to be powered to a degree by AI, is one that is founded in good ethical use of data sets and these models. We have to do that, I think, through a mix of legislation and regulation, standardization, and of course, good industry practice. I don't think you can always rely on these things to happen naturally without those regulations in place, which is why UK government is taking this very seriously. But, you know, the kind of big challenge for us really is to kind of, yeah, extract as much value out of these new technologies as possible to the benefit of citizens and to the economy, while also ensuring that we don't erode, you know, a lot of the good things that we as citizens have come to expect, such as, you know, ethical use of data and information.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think you're referring to the UK AI Security Institute, I think, which has set out a benchmark, and let's hope that continues to get more political support. And I think your point earlier you made is that AI, well, these observation technologies that you're very involved with can be used for surveilling and monitoring environmental stuff like DNA or whether a carbon credit sequestration project is still standing and sequestering carbon and even movements of people and potentially human rights and with the granularity it could get down to sort of workplace as well. So I guess there's that whole set of ethics around surveillance. And is that something which has come up in your studies, Mark, that you've been working on for the last, as you said, since the 80s? Who

SPEAKER_01:

owns this data?

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Look, I think in one sense, mining is quite fortunate in that we're not a consumer-based type business. So in that sense, a lot of our exposure to personal data is limited in some respects. But to your point around surveillance, definitely, you know, a lot of the really interesting and actually pretty value-adding uses of some AI technologies is around things like CCTV and safety data, you know, For instance, we, along with many other miners, have fatigue management systems in our trucks where we're monitoring our drivers, their body language, their eye movements, a number of other indicators that all will lead us to believe that maybe they're taking a nap, they're having micro-sleeps, and it's time for them to sort of pull over and take a break. Now, you know, initially when that was first introduced, a lot of people were pretty resistant to being monitored in that way, and, you know, obviously there's a lot of trust and process that needs to go into sort of creating the right frameworks for us to be able to use that data. But at the same time, once you can demonstrate to people that that data is very useful and you can, you know, you can show a truck driver that actually he was asleep for six seconds, you know, while driving an ultra-class truck along a haul road, you know, you can get some buy-in where people begin to see the value of this and you can being in the process of using some of these tools to help people and keep them safe. But, you know, definitely how we use data, how we monitor people, you know, these are all key questions. There are regulations that we have to abide by. And I think those are good things that have sort of come along, mostly geared around other industries. But for us, obviously, they also create the boundaries that we have to play within. I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02:

So I think we've had a really good discussion or really good insight into what some of these innovations, technologies are and the need for data, the applications, the business case, for why it is necessary, probably essential for at least some parts of the industry. Looking ahead to build on this, how does this work? I mean, I think which comes through both of a little bit of research we've done on your work is collaboration and funding for the right things at the right time is going to be essential, but perhaps the prince of those two is collaboration. Could you speak a little bit about how we're going to collaborate around these innovations, especially in this world that we're in now, which has these geopolitical tensions. And as you said right at the beginning, Mark, I think it's a very competitive industry. How are we going to continue to advance and stay ahead and make sure that the applications get to where they need to get to? Craig, perhaps I could speak to you, because I think the UK Space Agency does have a funding element to it as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And most of what we do is collaborative in nature, be that through academia with industry, be that through different types of companies be that companies crossing industrial boundaries so working between sectors and also working internationally so space is by its very nature an international business where a lot of our work is done with international partners to the European Space Agency or through bilaterals such as with our international bilateral fund which allows UK companies to work with companies overseas collaborating on lots of different activities I think you know when I think of mining in particular You know, some of our kind of main tools that we've used within the UK Space Agency to support companies that are selling into and serving those markets are things like our European Space Agency business applications program, which is looking at new products and services that can be developed that use satellites as part of that service and are sold into different markets. So we've had a number of different kind of environmental monitoring projects that are geared towards mining, for example, monitoring kind of, you know, micro land movements to kind of preempt land slippage and things like that, things that really feed into the kind of health and safety of big industrial setups. Also looking at a kind of movement of goods and transport and logistics. So we've actually funded some work on monitoring people's body language and kind of voice patterns, et cetera, to help on that health and safety side that Mark mentioned earlier through the European Space Agency looking at using satellites to make sure that that information and data is provided back to the kind of HQ or operations center in real time. So that's something that we've funded. But back to your point, the kind of collaborative nature of innovation and business, I think, is really baked into pretty much all of our programs. And any company within the mining sector that has an interest in perhaps working with a company in the UK space sector can always come to us. We have opportunities to co-fund developments and and demonstrations to demonstrate the utility of some of these products and services.

SPEAKER_02:

And Mark, in the industry, you've been spearheading and leading the Global Mining Guidelines Group, which I think is a group which really inspires and demonstrates that collaboration is not only needed, but can happen. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think definitely GMG is very much about collaboration. And I think the thing that we usually say around this topic is that we We have some huge industry problems. These aren't like a company's problems. We're faced as an industry with some significant problems that we need to get our head around. And our belief is that not only are we facing these industry problems, but no single company is going to solve any of these problems by themselves. There are big problems that require a lot of smarts and probably a lot of investment to figure out what is the right way forward. And we also believe strongly that we don't have enough time for us all to work through the same dead ends. to figure out, you know, what is the optimal way forward here. And so, you know, the GMG view is that we really do need to collaborate around these things. It's the only way that we can find solutions quickly by sharing, by being, I guess, somewhat coordinated in how we tackle some things and sharing that information and learning from each other. And really as an industry, looking to solve some of the industry challenges that we've got, rather than trying to take these things on an individual basis. So that's kind of at the heart of what GMG is about. And certainly when it comes to things like decarbonisation, some of the challenges we've got there. As I said, they're industry problems. These aren't just about a Pacific problem or a Rio Tinto problem. These are things that we're all struggling with. They're not really a competitive advantage issue. They're really more existential problems that we all face if we're going to keep operating. And I think we all agree in the industry that we're an important part of the energy transition. It really can't take place without the raw materials that we need to provide. But if you look at just things like copper for instance and you know there's many other commodities you can pick on but the amount of copper required to to fuel this this this energy transition with a lot of the new technologies that are required to to help us with the renewable energy we need to find better smarter ways of finding that copper of opening new mines or mining that copper and getting it to market as efficiently as possible and you know all of that is not something any one company is going to solve so again you know we we kind of take this view that copper collaboration is just absolutely crucial here.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. Well, sadly, we've come to the end of our time together, but maybe I could just leave with one question for each of you, which is 10 years ahead. What is the, I mean, looking back 10 years and go, what is the one innovation, the technology, technological innovation that has been most fundamental in changing the course of mining or changing the business of mining?

SPEAKER_01:

I think if I was to think forward 10 years, and what mining looks like. Honestly, I think probably, I think automation is going to be one of the key pieces here because, you know, we're really well into automation in many aspects, but I think it'll continue to grow. And I think AI will be one of the key ingredients of that automation for sure, because it'll help underpin and sort of be one of the core technologies sitting underneath that. But I think automation we're already seeing is a huge value add. It's safer if we can take people out of harm's way. Let's Labor costs are amongst our highest costs. A lot of these jobs are what we call the dull, dangerous, drudgerous, sort of dirty jobs that nobody really enjoys that much. And we're finding it harder to get people to do some of these jobs. So automation, I think, will begin to change the complexion of what we need in terms of the jobs required to do mining. There's a big focus on zero entry mining. So again, trying to remove people out of the mine space. And when we begin to automate, it allows us some interesting ways to do perhaps mining a little differently than the ways we currently do it with different types of equipment and some other innovations that I think will come along. So I'm going to suggest automation, continued automation, more advanced and clever forms of automation, I think are going to sort of be what the mind of the future really looks like.

SPEAKER_02:

Great. From your perspective in space, with God's eye, what do you see in the future?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, I think, you know, the stuff that Mark just mentioned really does chime with me. The autonomy, I think, is something quite close to our heart anyway, because, of course, I think a lot of the work on autonomous vehicles, what have happened when we were building Mars rovers and lunar rovers, where we know that remotely operated robotics is fundamental to a lot of our exploration that we do in the solar system. And I think that there is a lot to be learned from some of the key techniques and technologies that we employ in the space exploration space when it comes to autonomous robotics and hazardous environments. It's a big theme for us in space. I think one of the things that I'm really interested in from a space agency perspective is the question of transferring the other direction in many respects. What are the techniques and technologies that we need to move off world that are currently done on Earth? Mark mentioned earlier about some of the extreme energy requirements of AI on Earth and the cooling requirements of these big server farms. It's one of the reasons why there are companies out there now looking at whether or not it makes sense to put some of this stuff in orbit, where, of course, you get your cooling and your energy somewhat for free. And so, you know, some of that is likely to come through over the next couple of decades and could, in fact, kind of enhance some of the things that we've been talking about today for the mining industry. But also, you know, there are companies out there that are looking at kind of in-situ resource utilization as part of our exploration program. So how do we extract kind of minerals and and use them on other planetary bodies, on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids. And of course, there's a subset of companies out there that are looking to actually prospect and extract minerals from different celestial bodies like asteroid mining, et cetera. I mean, we're probably talking much more than 10 years away before we start seeing that done in anger. But it's definitely something I think that we should kind of keep one eye on as we kind of innovate within the space sector over the coming decades.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, thank you very much, Mark and Craig. The session, I think, has been everything I expected it to be. It's been insightful. It's been intellectual a little bit for me, a bit of a stretch in some areas, and quite frankly, very exciting. Makes me look forward to the future. I think my only frustration is that we couldn't develop further some of the very many points that you brought up, but luckily, you're going to be appearing at the Resourcing Tomorrow conference in a And I very much look forward to meeting you and hearing some more of your thoughts then, as I'm sure the participants of the conference will do too. Thank you very much. And I'll close it there for today.