Technology has the potential to help the profit-squeezed South African mining industry to start earning better margins again, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) novel mining methods manager Dr Jeannette McGill said last week.

McGill added that South Africa’s gold and platinum miners, in particular, had reached a crossroads similar to that of the North American copper sector in the 1960s and 1970s, when technology had to come to the rescue in the form of the solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW) methodology.

“We’re definitely in challenging times, and there’s most definitely a role for technology,” said McGill, who recalls that SX-EW effec-tively engineered a second wind of life into the North American copper operations.

“I currently equate what was happening in the copper sector then to what is currently impacting on South Africa’s hard-rock mining, and what we can do is resort to a robotic mining method,” McGill told Mining Weekly.

For a variety of underground as well as aboveground risks, the margins of hard-rock miners have been squeezed exceedingly tightly at a time of the commodity cycle bottoming out.

“This is the opportunity for technology to step in and change some of the fundamentals that go into the mining equation,” said McGill, whose PhD at the Colorado School of Mines looked at the competitiveness of South Africa’s platinum sector.

Mining is researched in a variety of different units within the CSIR – South Africa’s largest parastatal research agency, which reports that most mining majors are tackling technology, either as first movers or fast followers.

The CSIR’s Centre for Mining Innovation, in Johannesburg, is the central repository and domain specialist, which involves the rest of the CSIR from an expertise capacity viewpoint.

In the short term, the centre wants to use robots to improve safety in mines.

“Our first port of call has been a safety plat-form. Where there are accidents underground, we can send in a robotic safety platform.”

In the longer term, the centre envisages sending in a robotic machine to mine narrow tabular reefs in currently inaccessible ultra-deep areas.

Narrow tabular reefs characterise the gold and platinum environments, where the reef height can be from 10 cm to 40 cm but stoping widths of 1 m and more have to be extracted to meet legal requirements.