What contribution has innovation made to the Anglo American turnaround story?
Today, every person in our business is delivering 70% more saleable product than in 2012. Half of that improvement per person is a consequence of refining the overall quality of our portfolio. The other half comes from different mining designs, new operating practices and the implementation of new technologies or technical improvements. Of the changes that we have been in control of, one third has been the result of technology.
We have re-tooled the organization and put the best technical brains together with the most practical operators. We want to find different ways to mine the ore body and more efficient ways to mine. The cost benefits of new technologies are enormous because they require smaller equipment and smaller plants.
What new technologies are you working on?
To be more productive and cost-competitive as an industry, we need to develop new ways of extracting the ore without all the waste rock. Extractive technologies that we are looking at include using lasers for drilling and deploying microbes which digest the ore to produce an elixir full of mineral.
At the same time, we are also using Big Data to analyze truck movements around the pit to increase productivity and medical imaging of the extracted ore to adjust our processing in real time.
The rate of technological change in our industry is going to be quicker than we have ever seen before.
How are your investments in innovation helping support sustainability?
Innovation touches everything we do. It has made Anglo American safer, more productive, more cost-competitive and more accepted by our host communities. On the safety side, automation and new mining technologies are taking people out of dangerous areas into higher skilled jobs. In the environmental area, we are working on new processing technologies which eliminate the use of fresh water and reduce energy consumption.
From the social development point of view, we are working with a whole range of stakeholders so that we can make local communities partners in the way that we develop our operations. Sustainable innovation is critical to our business model
As published in TIME magazine
