Quarry Southern Africa March 2018 | Page 18

Exhibitors at the 2018 Investing in African Mining Indaba ranged from OEMs to junior mining companies. Sustainability Another topic that was prevalent throughout Mining Indaba 2018 is that of sustainability in all its many forms. Bridging the gap 16 _ QUARRY SA | MARCH/APRIL 2018 Gift of the Givers was also present at the event, raising awareness of Cape Town’s water crisis and encouraging delegates to donate to help address the situation. between technology and sustainability was Deloitte’s Jan-Adriaan du Plessis, associate director for strategy and operations – energy and resources. Du Plessis gave a presentation on sustainable intelligent mining, which he defined as addressing four main issues: the way decisions are made; the skills that will be required in future; how resources are managed; and how value is shared. What does this mean? He explained that digital platforms allow for more descriptive real-time information to be used for decision making. Digitisation and technology will also change the way the mine of the future works, requiring mining organisations to so that we can test things in the digital world before we apply them in the real world.” In summary, Hamilton stated that it is likely there will be some dramatic technological changes by the year 2050. “From an industry standpoint we really need to start innovating with digitalisation and IoT. All of the majors are talking about this, but just by listening to Mining Indaba this week, it is a recurring theme overall.” Jeff Hamilton, director of brand strategy and alliances at Dassault Systèmes, spoke about how the Internet of Things (IoT) will shape the mine of the future. He gave a brief overview of the areas that he believes will see great change by 2050, including increasing human population, changes in social structure (the rise of the sharing economy), human enhancement (in terms of both cognition and prosthetics), natural resource consumption (an increase in population levels will drive a decrease in per capita consumption and reuse of resources), natural resource extraction techniques, urbanisation, energy, robotics, artificial intelligence, changing labour and skills requirements, an increase in connected devices and platform considerations stemming from this increase. According to Hamilton, there will likely be between 35 and 50 billion IoT devices by 2050, which will have a significant impact on the way society – and industry – functions. But while big data is a recurring idea that comes up everywhere these days, he was quick to stress that this is a tool, not an end game. “It’s not really about big data, it’s about actionable intelligence, which relates to whatever KPIs you're looking at for your organisation. Our view is that the mining IoT is digitally connected, it’s data driven, it’s model based, and ultimately, we get to probably the most important element here: we combine the virtual and the real. So what we can do with this … [IoT] ecosystem in 2050 is we can make a digital twin of the mine, and then model, simulate and optimise Mining MINING INDABA 2018 Jonathan Veeran, partner and deputy head of law firm Webber Wentzel’s mining sector group on mineral resources. SRK Consulting (SA) chairman William Joughin presented a range of technological innovations developed and applied by SRK in its mining project work.