At the moment it seems very little has changed.
If a miner who was there when the first sod was turned at what is now Rio Tinto's Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah, US more than 100 years ago looked into the pit today he would know exactly what was going on.
While the equipment has become much larger - and it should be noted Bingham Canyon had train and shovel rather than truck and shovel mining up until the 1980s - the process has remained the same.
Many miners are going to face increased demand for their products as the world looks to transition away from fossil fuel-derived energy. At the same time, they are going to come under increased pressure to mine those extra metals while using fewer fossil fuels themselves.
On the equipment front it seems the tools have become about as large as they are going to, certainly on the truck side of things. There the tyres are the limiting factor with the largest 63-inch tyres not likely to get any bigger.
If the trucks are not going to get any bigger it does not make much sense to make the shovels any bigger either.
While the equipment may not get any larger - and it might even get smaller - it will likely get smarter and give up fossil fuel for non-carbon emitting energy sources.
Greater use is likely to be made of autonomy when it comes to haulage.
Or perhaps trucks will be done away with all together. There are several conveyor-related technologies emerging.
More work will be done on eliminating the siloes that have been built up over the different parts of the ore process allowing the transmission of data right from the drills through to the plant.
Tools are being developed that allow greater understanding of the orebody, the rock around it and where the waste and ore has gone post blasting.
Filling a gap in the mine planning software could also lead to big benefits. The gap lies in the short-term interval control space. Imagine being able to react to a change in ore grade instantly, with the changes rippling through the fleet management system and automatically updating the medium and long-term plans.
Ore body knowledge will be crucial to this sort of approach, as will artificial intelligence.
Mix that ore body knowledge with what the plant needs to meet what the customers want and the amount of material that needs to be moved can be greatly reduced.
Imagine an excavator operator being shown exactly where to put the bucket to get the right material. It will be a bit like an operator at a coal mine simply digging along the seam. Or if there is overburden, exactly where to dig to get to the ore faster.
Or perhaps the future of surface mines will actually be underground. As underground bulk mining techniques improve underground mining will become a more viable economic option. Certainly, from a social licence to operate perspective, underground mining leaves a much smaller footprint than a surface mine.
Partners in Performance head of Australia and New Zealand Michael Huggins said it might be that the surface mining process would remain unchanged.
However, he said, there were some trends emerging.
"One thing for sure is electrification," Huggins said.
True, the truck technology is not there yet but it is evolving and there is a fair bit of money being thrown at it.
The automation systems available today play to those areas. They can help haul trucks operate more efficiently, with the artificial intelligence telling trucks the optimal time to refuel. Bring that into an electrified fleet and that recharging conundrum becomes a little easier to solve.
However, the technology needed to create battery electric haul trucks is still being developed.
There are a couple of crowd sourcing projects in the market looking at that, including the Charge On innovation challenge.
Caterpillar lays claim to having the most autonomous haul trucks in the market with more than 525 machines.
Earlier this year Caterpillar group president of Resource Industries Denise Johnson told an investor day that the important thing about autonomy was what it drove: consistence of operations.
"Our customers have had zero injuries and productivity improvement of up to 30% over staffed fleets."
In September Caterpillar marked the 5 billionth tonne of material moved by its autonomous trucks.
Johnson said the customers adopting automation were getting smaller.
"When we started deploying autonomy in the 2013 timeframe we deployed to the largest mine sites around," she said.
"Since then the economics have changed and they've improved, such that the deployments have progressed to smaller and smaller mines. In this year and next we will be deploying to sites with as few as 12 trucks. This provides potential for an application to a much larger customer base and it actually even extends down into the quarry and aggregate sites."
While Caterpillar has the most autonomous trucks in the market, Komatsu was the one that led the way in the 2000s, starting out with five 930E AC trucks hauling waste autonomously at Rio Tinto's West Angelas iron ore mine in WA.
While a lot of the focus is on the autonomous trucks, it is really the fleet management system that makes it all work.
Komatsu general manager mining automation Garry Povah said fleet management was key for those wanting to get the best benefits from automation.
"You will hear any of the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers], when they talk about automation, there is a fleet management system," he said.
"In a larger fleet, that's the only way to get optimisation. Those efficiencies go into your dig operators and primary dig units.
"It's optimising the dig fleet and optimising your crusher.
"It's getting the best across all. It's not necessarily the fastest all the time but across a fleet over a period of time it is far superior.
"That's where we're talking about process improvement."
On the fuel front, Povah said companies were rushing to batteries and excluding interim steps such as hybrid offerings.
"What supports a mine in the future will change," he said.
"To replace diesel you're going to need five times the power infrastructure to power the equipment.
"Not only is that power generation, it's the fixed infrastructure in terms of powerlines.
"Automation makes it easier from a safety position in terms of charging.
"If you think about hydrogen that in itself is quite a technical process. But also quite dangerous if you get it wrong."
Povah said there would be marked improvements over the next 10 years.
"Technology is advancing.
"There's no wrong or right answer out there at the moment.
"I take a helicopter view to it in a way. From where I sit today, automation a significant enabler towards limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
"Different companies are on different journeys and different parts of their journeys," he said.
"From a peripheral view, mining hasn't changed. Automation has just changed one of the processes in the mine.
"Once you start getting into the smarts of the metals, knowing exactly which metal you want to dig and how you want to dig that will change the process."
Another option is for miners to turn away from surface mining altogether and go straight to an underground option.
Partners in Performance global mining practice leader Richard Horton said with a growing focus on environmental, social and governance, some miners were looking to minimise the amount of ground they disturb.
Iluka's Balranald rutile deposit in the northern Murray Basin region of New South Wales is an example.
"They had full approval to mine at surface," Horton said.
"They've gone back to the drawing board to look at underground to reduce the surface disturbance."
Horton said social licence to operate would also play a part.
"A lot of what we'll see will be driven by what stakeholders and shareholders want to see," he said.
"They don't want any repeats of environmental disasters in mining.
"That will dictate how mines will operate.
"I see this starting to evolve and shape how the operations look."
Huggins said in-situ recovery techniques were a symptom of that.
This is where, in very crude terms, a lixivant is pumped into the earth to dissolve the metals held in the rock and bring them to the surface in solution.
"It's a low carbon method of mining," Huggins said.
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Read the full article - Australia's Mining Monthly
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