Coal news and updates

BHP Coal will move 200 staff into their Brisbane head office so they can run their mine ¬operations remotely from the CBD.

The staff – who will move over the next few months – will operate train loading, the shovel that digs the coal and the plant that washes the coal, through automation from the confines of their city office.

In addition to this advance, BHP Coal said driverless trucks could also potentially help the industry be more productive in the future.

But the company said it would also need people on site as staff would never be able to fully manage mines from afar.

The move by BHP Coal towards automating much of its plant and equipment is a duplication of its robomining centre in Perth, which runs much of the iron ore mining in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

The idea, according to BHP Coal, is not to replace humans with robots but to make mines more productive.

It’s the way of the future, ¬according to BHP’s president of operations minerals, Mike Henry. However, there is a limit.

“You will see incremental progress on automation but the day when you have no one sitting on a mine site is a very, very far into the future,’’ Mr Henry said. “You still have people on site but there will be activities that will be monitored and managed out of the Brisbane office.

“The focus here is not reducing people, it’s getting people sitting beside each other.’’

Like driverless cars appear to be the future of motoring, driverless trucks are the likely next step in mining. Western Australia already has them and BHP Coal has trialled them at its New Mexico operation.

“It’s still something we are demonstrating. We have not got to the point where we are happy to deploy that on a wider scale,’’ Mr Henry said.

The Queen St centre, known as the Integrated Resource Operations Centre, will operate equipment at all of the company’s 10 joint-venture mines in Queensland and NSW.

Source: heraldsun.