The global mining industry has come a long way since the days when coal-blackened miners would carry a bird underground with them in hopes its distress would alert them to the presence of toxic gases.
"It was just a huge success for us," said Shannon Rhynold, Nutrien's vice-president of potash engineering, technology and capital. "And because you’re opening that new ground, you’re always at risk of what’s in the ground above you, what's on the walls on the side of you." At the Boddington gold mine in Western Australia, human drivers have been replaced by a fully autonomous haulage fleet of 36 trucks. In Chile, mining giant BHP is installing autonomous drills at its Spence copper mine. Chinese telecom firm Huawei has been installing 5G technology to allow underground mine workers to be replaced by machines operated from the surface.
At an investor presentation earlier this year, Imperial Oil CEO Brad Corson said the company's fleet of autonomously operated heavy-haul Caterpillar trucks at its Kearl oilsands mine in northern Alberta is demonstrating 10 to 15 per cent higher productivity than staffed trucks.