WORLD PROSPECTS
Teck’s AHS efforts speed up for RACE21
The ongoing autonomous pilot project using
Caterpillar trucks at Highland Valley Copper
(HVC) in British Columbia, owner Teck
Resources told IM, “has progressed well in terms of
safety, increased productivity and cost reductions,
which is needed to enhance the feasibility of
extending HVC’s mine life to 2040”.
Originally, six new 793F CMD autonomous trucks
were put into operation, then three more new
trucks were added in 2019, bringing the total to
nine, and in 2020 the fleet has again been
expanded to 13, with HVC targeting a further
increase before the end of 2020. By July 2020, the
fleet had already safely hauled 207,000 loads,
driven 920,000 km and moved 47.7 Mt. This project
is notable for being the first AHS project worldwide
involving a deep, steep sided pit in a cold climate.
Elsewhere, there is a six-truck AHS pilot using
Komatsu 930E trucks underway at Elkview for Teck
to assess the use of AHS at its steelmaking coal
operations. Komatsu is already well established in
Canada with its AHS program through its growing
fleet at Suncor’s oil sands operations. In addition,
Teck plans to implement Caterpillar’s 794AC AHS
kits to enable autonomous haulage at its majorityowned
Quebrada Blanca Phase 2 copper mining
operations currently under construction in Chile.
This is all part of Teck’s RACE21™ innovationdriven
transformation program with an annualised
EBITDA improvement target of C$500 million ($379
million) by the end of 2020, however, Teck’s ability
to achieve its targets on its planned timeline is
uncertain because it will be impacted by the
duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teck says it will provide an update on timing in its
September quarter reporting.
There are four pillars to RACE21, which were
outlined by Andrew Milner, Teck Senior Vice
President, Innovation and Technology, in an
interview last year. The first pillar is Renew: looking
at foundational infrastructure, systems and
processes, and what needs to be done to position
Teck to be world class in that space, so it can
support a future operating state. The second is
Automate: looking at company-wide automation
opportunities for robotics, processes and
equipment. The third pillar is Connect: looking at
how it leverages data so it can be treated like any
other high-value asset to lower variability across
the full value chain. And the fourth pillar is
Empower: the collective impact “Renew”,
“Automate” and “Connect” of looking at how Teck
works, what skills it needs and how it can truly
enable its people to meet these new opportunities.
So, RACE21 includes a wide range of projects but
core areas include unifying and modernising Teck’s
core systems across its mines and establishing a
technology foundation that facilitates deployment
of Connect and Automate reliably, and at scale. For
example: wireless site infrastructure to support
automation, sensing, site communications,
information access, pit-to-port integration and
advanced analytics as well as accelerating and
scaling up the autonomy program. Other key aims
are a transformational shift in safety, reducing pertonne
mining costs with smaller fleets and
providing innovation platforms to enable
implementation of advanced analytics to drive cycle
time improvement and predictive maintenance.
Part of RACE21 is also working with OEMs
through the ICMM to develop zero-GHG surface
mining vehicles. Another RACE21 initiative is shovelbased
sensor-based ore sorting where Teck has
taken a leading role by pioneering the development
and implementation of MineSense for dynamic ore
sorting. As of last year, this had been installed on
three rope shovels using the 2nd generation
ShovelSense “SX2” System. Availability increased
after adopting a maintenance strategy, with early
results delivering good value and full ramp-up
ongoing in 2020. Teck has also been updating
copper algorithms to recognise different mineral
assemblages while continuing with reliability and
maintenance strategy work.
www.teck.com; www.cat.com/mining;
www.mining.komatsu
Zyfra hits drill management system milestone at Berezovskiy
Zyfra has completed the 50th installation of its
high-precision blasthole drill management
system (Zyfra Precision Drill), which increases
productivity and quality of drilling operations in openpit
mines based on high-precision navigation and realtime
monitoring of drilling parameters. The 50th
installation happened at the Berezovskiy open-pit
mine, one of the leading coal producers in the
Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbass) in southwestern Siberia,
Russia. The mine is owned by the Stroyservis company.
Zyfra Mining (formerly – VIST Group), a division of
Zyfra, has a successful record of work in the mining
industry for over 30 years with 100-plus mines using
the company’s products, including mine fleet
management systems and autonomous mining dump
trucks.
“By 2022, we plan to add our drill management
solutions to 30 more locations across the globe. The
next step in our continuous technology development
would be the upgrade to autonomous drilling, which
can include tele-operation,” Liana Meliksetyan, Chief
Operating Officer at Zyfra, said. The implementation of
the system allows significant improvement in the
drilling process, replacing the physical control points
with automated high-precision navigation on the blast
hole grid. Information received from drill rigs in real
time can be reported in various ways that allows quick
monitoring of the drilling parameters from the machine
cabin and on mobile devices, as well as to analyse rock
hardness when planning the blast site. Zyfra Precision
Drill can also increase the quality of blasting through
automatically collected information about rock
hardness.
According to EuroChem, one of the world’s leading
mineral fertiliser producers and an adopter of this
technology, implementation of the Zyfra Precision Drill
reduced idle times on average by 12 machine hours a
week. GV Gold (also known as Vysochaishy), one of the
fastest growing Russian gold mining companies, says
the Zyfra Precision Drill implementation has
significantly improved its drilling process. With the
same number of drills, the blast volume has increased
20%. There was also a 15% increase of drill rig
productivity and a 10% reduction of re-drilling volume
among the expected results of the system
implementation.
Zyfra Precision Drill can run in the Cloud or on mine
servers, and can provide easy data exchange between
the various parties involved with the drilling, the
company says. www.zyfra.com; www.suek.com
8 International Mining | SEPTEMBER 2020