Mining giant AngloGold Ashanti believes that automation technology will assist in reinventing deep-level mining in South Africa, which hosts some of the world’s deepest mines.

“We think that the mining industry will increasingly go underground, and research and development (R&D) will have to increase to create solutions that will be more suitable for deep-level underground mining,” said AngloGold Ashanti senior VP for technical development Mike Macfarlane. He spoke at the third annual global mining technology forum, in Johannesburg.

“In the mining industry, everybody wants go into automation and there is a lot of effort and money being spent on R&D but we are not seeing maximum results.

He noted that AngloGold Ashanti was mostly “in the manual era, where there is not a lot of machinery and mechanisation, and the company is still dependent on people doing most of the work”

“The world is in the mechanisation era, especially when we speak of underground mining; this is a good sign because now we are able to let people focus more on what they are good at and machines will do the same.

“The advantage of this is that, in the network area, you can speed up decision-making as it becomes more ‘thinking’ dominant, and this will mean more time to fix the problem. At our company, we are focused on speeding up automation.

“We think automation is where the true value and future of the mining industry lie.”

He said one of the challenges that the mining industry faced was control over the environment. “We have done a lot of automation on the surface [regarding] control over the environment but, underground, we have not had a lot of success because we are unable to control the environment,” he explained.

Further, Macfarlane noted that mining companies needed to change their attitude towards automation and the way it was being introduced in underground mining.

“We wanted to introduce tunnel boring into underground mining but we faced a few chal- lenges that required the expertise of 25 industry leaders to create a design that would suit the mine.

“With the new technology, AngloGold Ashanti was able to solve some major problems – we were leaving 40% of the reserves behind as we went to depth and we were diluting the orebody.

“Instead of a design that was centred on the mine, we gave the experts the opportunity to design the mine in such a way that it would be suited to the technology that we needed and today we are confident in saying our tunnel boring system is a success.”