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GMG Sudbury Forum

Program

Global Mining Guidelines Group provides a collaborative and innovative space for stakeholders across the mining industry to share knowledge, expertise and experience to develop operator-driven guidance, resources, and common practices in response to industry demand. Learn more about how you can make an impact through GMG.

MacLean has nearly a decade of practical experience in the deployment of BEVs into numerous underground mining environments.  This experience includes the introduction of an individual BEV at a site but now more often is at the 10+ fleet level. Both situations present challenges in the successful adoption of the BEV and new innovations appear because of customers realizing some of their own limitations and logistic challenges. This presentation will focus on the latest “lessons learned” and some newly forming innovations in helping customers get the maximum benefit from their battery fleet operations.

Details to come

Most underground mining operations today make extensive use of diesel powered mobile vehicles. As battery technologies advance, many companies are seeing the benefits of replacing diesel-powered vehicles with BEVs in underground mining operations.

How do you solve some big challenges like integrating a mixed fleet, solutions from a variety of OEMs, building your charging infrastructure to serve a mixed fleet environment? OEMs are working together to enable the safe deployment and use of BEVs make things happen safely – how to make things work, battery handling and safety from those deploying.

Hear from a panel of OEMs involved in the deployment of BEVs on how they are integrating a mixed fleet, what is and isn’t working, how they are tackling things like battery handling, and what’s required to enable successful implementation.

What is it going to take to achieve emissions targets for 2030 and beyond that to net zero goals? How are we going to get there considering the current global supply chain issues? During this working session participants will work together on how to achieve success.

Vale has been on electrification journey for decades. Green Energy vehicle program at Vale continues to help organization bring trust and confidence in technology by Trialing and Performing tradeoffs. The presentation will share Vale’s journey and key learnings with recent achievement BEV playbook. BEV playbook is a key enabler of Vale’s GEV vision and guideline future greenfield and brownfield electric vehicle investment decisions at Vale North Atlantic Personnel at all levels of the organization would use this as guidance document to learn about battery electric vehicles and how to adjust their mine planning and capital allocation decisions to ensure high utilization and adoption of all battery electric vehicles in their fleet. 

Torex Gold Resources’ Media Luna Project is an underground deposit that primarily contains gold, copper, and silver mineralization, located south of the Balsas River in Mexico. Construction is underway with commercial production estimated to begin in Q1 2025. This presentation will explain the initial trade-off, the company’s decision to deploy battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and the current process of operations readiness. 

Cyber criminals share knowledge and tools freely. Their attacks not only pose a financial and production risk, they also put our shared progress in safety and sustainability at risk. Hear what you can do to improve the cyber resiliency of your operations and prevent incidents that impact safety, environmental sustainability, or operational productivity

Historically, mining tunnel development has been done by drill and blast with current drilling  being accomplished with Jumbo Drills. Komatsu Mining began development of their Mechanical Rock Excavation (MRE) machine in 2008, which led to the manufacture of the MC51 unit in 2020. Since 2021 Komatsu in partnership with Vale have been trialing the use of the machine at Vale’s Garson Mine in Sudbury Ontario. MRE in the challenging rock conditions of the Canadian Shield is testing the limits of the technology. This presentation will outline the work to date, and outline the future plans for the trials.

All the ingredients of the future of mining exist – from electrification to autonomous mining to AI and more. There is a sense of urgency in the industry for guidance on enabling the use of emerging technologies. In order to move forward, there are aspects needing to be addressed, such as:

• What do you do?
• How do you de-risk implementation and use?
• How do you accelerate implementation?

How do we, as an industry, drive this progression while maintaining safe practices? We’ll work together on a strategy, identify what exists and what is needed, and figure out how to merge plans to enable progress to happen.

Automation at Agnico Eagle is part of Business Improvement Strategy.  The presentation objective is to emphasize the sharing of knowledge from our automation projects and our observations with automated and tele-remote loaders, haul trucks, drills. Agnico Eagle’s approach to mining automation, fostering technological advancement through Internal innovators and technology developers, enhance our employees’ expertise and experiences, and facilitate effective shaping of our future mines.

Details to come

The mining industry is increasingly embracing automation as a safety and productivity enabler and as a critical factor in creating a sustainable future of mining. For these reasons, automation is a key part of many mining companies’ digital transformation roadmaps.

As mines go deeper, autonomous solutions are seriously being looked at to solve big challenges like continuous productivity and safety. Underground mines are testing and deploying autonomous solutions. There are advanced technologies that exist today that would make it easier to tackle their challenges. This panel will be talking about the technologies available, the feasibility of their use in our mines, what it takes to be able to deploy and implement them, and some available solutions.

Is your operation about to deploy autonomous equipment into a new or existing operation? What is everything that needs to be considered to ensure you can safely operate your mine? Join others in identifying what needs to be considered, what can go wrong, what you need to be aware of, and more.

OffWorld is building swarms of interoperable low-cost robots that can undertake autonomous end-to-end mining in both open pit and underground mines. This presentation will cover some of the upcoming product deployments, next stages and how OffWorld’s terrestrial Swarm Robotic Mining will significantly reduce the cost of upstream extraction and mid-stream processing, take people out of harm’s way and the reduce carbon footprint of mine operations. By being able to mine deeper in previously uneconomical ore bodies, these robots will open up new mine opportunities compatible with current environmental and economic considerations.

The movement of bulk material is one of the core activities in an underground mine. This material comes primarily from development & production activities, and is transported to various locations (surface, chutes, crusher, stockpiles, etc.) depending on material types, mine configurations and other concurrent activities. Each of these material movement alternatives have unique capacities, productivities, limitations, and other distinctive specifications. The performance of a material movement alternative may also change depending on orebody profiles and mine design configurations.  Vale Base Metals and SRK have collaboratively developed a batch simulation tool for the analysis of Material Movement Alternatives within specific orebodies. The intent of this presentation is to provide an overview of the simulation tool.   

As an industry, we’re challenged with meetings targets while maintaining safe operations. Innovative technologies from beyond mining are now available to our industry – but we’re limited in what we can do as a lot of underground
mine designs are based on technology that has not fundamentally changed in years. There are rules and standards to meet so the idea of mine design needs transformational work to enable optimizing new technologies and enabling such things as ESG-led mine design. No more square pegs in round holes!

Panelists will discuss where limitations are in underground mine design and what can be done to enable the industry to take advantage of the advanced technologies available to us.