30 Jan Stephen Grano on the importance of integration

Stephen Grano, Executive Director of the University of Adelaide’s Institute for Mineral and Energy Resources (IMER), will be one of the university’s hosts for the GMG Adelaide Forum on secure and integrated energy and mining systems on March 20-21.

On why integration is important for the mining industry, Grano explains that, as resource value diminishes and input costs increase, “the industry is seeking to deliver higher value business plans that accommodate, or indeed exploit, resource heterogeneity and variability,” which can also be costly. One way to reduce costs is by streamlining decision-making processes “by targeting the extraction process (e.g. drill-blast-muck) to the specific characteristics of the resource and downstream requirements.” Integration can help to achieve this.

“By integrating the data streams from sensors, machines, storage and processes, the human decision maker may be removed from high-risk areas,” enabling “completely new engineering designs,” he says. Grano further notes that future resource extraction designs enabled by integration have great potential to reduce both capital and operational costs, especially in extreme and challenging conditions such as extreme depth, high temperature and stress, and dealing with penalty elements.

The University of Adelaide is a leader on this topic. IMER is currently leading initiatives in advanced sensors, multiple sensory data streams, and machine learning and simulation, among others that will be used to enable integrated mining and energy industry value chains.

See other confirmed speakers to date for the GMG Adelaide Forum here.