HIGH PROFILE
FutureSmart Mining overcoming hurdles
“If you look at FutureSmart Mining, at its
absolute essence, it is about footprint; how do
you change the footprint of mining? How do
you have a mine that draws no fresh water?
Mines without tailings dams? Mines that look
very different?” Tony O’Neill says
FutureSmart Mining™ is Anglo American’s approach to
sustainable mining, a program that applies innovative
thinking and technological advances to address mining’s
major challenges
“It’s clear that the pressures on us are
unsustainable, whether it is around our carbon
footprint, water footprint, or physical footprint,
and we are always looking for different ways to
push us in this future direction where our
footprint will be very different.”
Tony O’Neill, Anglo American Technical Director,
knows the company he works for is up against it
when it comes to retaining its reputation as one of
the world’s leading sustainable mining
companies.
It’s clear from the company’s 2018
sustainability report – which saw it achieve a
best-ever performance in terms of injuries, a cut in
energy use and an increase in greenhouse gas
emission savings – that Anglo is going down
multiple paths to reach its goals. O’Neill, who
joined the company almost six years ago, believes
Anglo’s FutureSmart Mining program will play a
major role in confronting and overcoming many of
the issues it (and the industry) is facing.
“If you look at FutureSmart Mining, at its
absolute essence, it is about footprint; how do
you change the footprint of mining? How do you
have a mine that draws no fresh water? Mines
without tailings dams? Mines that look very
different?” he told IM.
“It’s getting people to believe there is a
different way for mining in an industry that has, to
this point, been quite traditional. It is not going to
happen overnight, but I think we have a genuine
vision that is, in my view, quite feasible.”
IM spoke with O’Neill and Donovan Waller,
Group Head of Technology Development, recently
8 International Mining | JULY 2019
to get to the bottom of how technology is making
Anglo ever more sustainable.
IM: Could you explain how the Anglo operating
model facilitates and fosters innovation within the
context of FutureSmart Mining?
TO: The Anglo American operating model is the
chassis that underpins everything, giving us
certainty in the delivery of our work. When you have
got that stability – and the lack of variability – in
your business outputs, it is much easier to overlay
new technologies and processes. When you then
see a difference in operating or financial results, you
can confirm it is down to what you have
implemented, rather than the underlying processes.
I look at it a little bit like a three-legged stool:
you have the operating model on one leg, the
P101 benchmark-setting on another, and
technology and data analytics on the third leg.
They all co-exist in this system and work off each
other. Without one, the stool falls over.
IM: Out of all the tailings dam elimination work
you are carrying out (around passive resistivity,
fibre-optics, micro-seismic monitoring, coarse
particle recovery, polymers, and dry stacking),
which innovation will have an impact on Anglo’s
operations in the next three-to-five years?
TO: All of them. We started out with our tailings
program in 2013; in fact, our group technical
standards were re-issued at the beginning of 2014
and they are now one of the main guidelines the
ICMM (International Council on Mining and
Metals) uses.
Tailings dams have always been at the back
end of the mining process and, in a way, the
science behind them has never been part of the
mainstream operation. Our view, internally for
many years, is tailings dams are one of the
industry’s greatest risks.
Ultimately our aim is to eliminate tailings
dams. Period. Coarse particle flotation – getting
that coarser particle size that drains much more
freely – is core to that and you can see a
development pathway there. For example, with
some of these new flotation techniques, we now
only need 1% exposure of the mineral for it to be
effective. In the past, it was much higher.
When we upgraded the capability of our
tailings organisation, it became clear we needed
to get a lot more data off these tailings dams.
About three years ago, we started putting fibre-
optic sensors into the dams. We have since
developed, through our exploration arm, passive
resistivity seismic monitoring, which basically
tells you where your water sits in the dams. And,
we’re putting into Quellaveco micro-seismic
measuring techniques, which will be more
granular again. You can see the day coming really
quickly where tailings dams are a real-time data
source for mining companies.
We’re also, with our joint venture partner
Debswana, building the first polymer plant in
Botswana, which could have an impact on dry
tailing disposal.
The thing we need to crack – both ourselves
and the industry – is how to dry stack at scale. At
the moment, that is still a work-in-progress, but it
is doable in the long term.
IM: How is the bulk sorter you have operating at
El Soldado, which is equipped with a neutron
sensor, working?
TO: With the bulk sorter, we’re taking packages of
tonnes rather than individual rocks to enable us
to get both speed and volume. At El Soldado, we
are sorting in four tonne packages. You can adapt
the sorting profile by the characteristics of the
orebody. We’re generally looking to sort tonnages
that are less than you would put in a haul truck
body or bucket.
If you step right back, in the past, most
processing plants wanted to blend to get an
average feed. We are going the other way. We
want to use the heterogeneity of the orebody to
its advantage; the less mixing we can get ahead