IMARC 2024 drew the world’s major mining companies, a host of political and trade delegations, and most of the industry’s leading innovators to Sydney, Australia, for a memorable conference and exhibition. Mining Beacon editor Richard Roberts attended more than 40 sessions across three days to capture the diverse and powerful messaging from this year’s event.

Technology to the rescue, maybe

“I think I heard yesterday that, on average, new technology takes 12-to-16 years to really come to the fore and be adopted. We just don't have that time.” – head of strategic service at BHP, Gabrielle Sycamore

“Technology is the pathway to increase productivity, fundamentally. Our business recognises for us to continue to have a value proposition we need to drive productivity.” – head of autonomy and operations technology at Thiess, Trent Smith

“Some of the most profound challenges relate to the sheer pace of change required to necessitate meaningful abatement well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. 2030 is only five years and 2 months away.” – global solutions director, sustainability, resilience & climate response APAC at Jacobs, Janine Barrow

“We don't all need to run the same proof of concept. This is the time that the industry absolutely has to come together so that we can move, we can collaborate, we can build these networks and move quickly.” – veteran mining executive and Clean Energy Finance Corporation advisor, Stephen McIntosh

“What is the high-risk, high-payoff thing that may be worth investigation? My answer is the intersection between mining and biotechnology.” – US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager, Michael “Orbit” Nayak

“If we take an example of a 240-ton battery-electric haul truck, and [ask], can we achieve cost parity by 2030? We believe that we can for most mines. This is important because if we look at diesel haulage today it’s often about 30% of total mining cost. It's often 40% of maintenance cost, and it's often two-thirds or so of scope one emissions.” – senior partner at McKinsey & Co, Richard Sellschop

“The pace of disruption in the industry will change and I think it will accelerate. And the appetite of mining operators to adopt a technology and to take a risk on something which may not have been the norm through the last few decades will change and we’ll see that accelerate.” – director and head of RCF Innovation Funds, Andrew Jessett

“Change management … We tend to suck at that, by and large. I see efforts to improve, which is good, because that holds us back.” – general manager digital technology & innovation at CITIC Pacific Mining and chair of the Global Mining Guidelines Group, Mark O’Brien

No future mines without future people

“We believe there’s going to be a need for a greater focus on people to both unleash the discretionary energy of the people in our industry and to attract and retain the next generation.” – senior partner at McKinsey & Co, Richard Sellschop

“I would say students are now more selective about what they want in a grad program and more and more are moving towards companies that align with their own personal values.” – final-year University of New South Wales mining engineering student, Ashley Potter

“Almost every person I speak to in the industry says the same thing: most of our leaders have been promoted and moved through the ranks as a result of their technical skillsets rather than their people leadership skills. That has to change. It’s a critical issue for our industry today, not in 10 years’ time.” – group manager, diversity & inclusion at Thiess, Nevinia Davenport

“The truth is there's very few people out there today who have 20-to-30 years of experience building a project, who are still hungry to do it. We are talking about a very, very limited universe of people. The scarcity of people in the pipeline who actually know what they're doing, and who are still willing to do it ... is one of the biggest challenges that this industry faces.” – mining fund partner at Denham Capital, Bert Koth

“We have great history. We’ve got great processes. Can we move quickly enough to take advantage of some of the things that are changing?” – Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger

“If you add up the membership of the AusIMM, SME, SAIMM and the CIM, I think you come to 50,000 people. The Chinese rare earths equivalent alone has, I think, 100,000 people in it. There is a huge human resource in China that we just can’t match.” – adjunct professor of resource engineering at Monash University in Australia, David Whittle

“The industry is probably more transactional and people who are career miners are probably lost to the industry and now we've got people that come in and out. And how that manifests itself is we've got more accidents. We've had a trend down with accidents and now we've got a trend probably flattening or trending up.” – founder and managing director of Universal Field Robots, Jeff Sterling

“There are very few people that have actually got that experience of going out and raising large amounts of capital in a very short period of time and while that's easy to talk about it's actually very difficult to do because there's a lot of gamesmanship that's going on in the market.” – portfolio manager resources and energy at Acorn Capital, Rick Squire

“There have been labour shortages and in some areas an inability to attract youth and technical talent. As the world transitions to a net zero future talent will be critical and really articulating your ESG credentials and driving a value-added culture will be critical for future production.” – sustainable investing analyst at Fidelity International, Sue Lyn Stubbs

“The issue we have is we've lost a lot of the skills and expertise in the Western world through offshoring. So now if we want to build out our refining capacity ... good luck finding the experts.” – director at the Critical Minerals Association Australia, Olimpia Pilch

“I would argue that one of the reasons that our time frames are expanding so much is because there are so few people in the system. The regulators have to have defensible data. They’re going to be risk averse. The proponents have to make a cogent argument. And all of that just takes time and people and money.” – managing partner at Pacific Road Capital, Matt Fifield

Moving in the right circles

“Something like 75% of all the aluminium made in history is still in use today because of the ability to recycle. So you’ve got that circular economy almost built into the economics of the industry.” – Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger

“The basic business model, which is 98-99% waste production and a byproduct that you make a profit from … has been around for far too long, so it's ripe for disruption, especially in a supply constrained world.” – director and co-founder of Canada’s Materials Efficiency Research Group, Alan Young

“The waste inventories ... We are leaving billions of dollars on the table that could well be in the coffers of mining companies and their partners. We only do that because of bad accounting.” – Young again

“We’ve seen through many success cases in the mining industry that circularity allows you to save money. We’ve seen in capital equipment savings up to 50% [and] up to 80% in remanufacturing.” – founder of the Centre Innovation and Circular Economy in Chile, Petar Ostojic

“We’re living a paradigm shift, the fourth industrial revolution, and we think the economic model of this new revolution will be the circular economy.” – Ostojic thesis

“Anything between five-to-seven million tonnes of copper, pre-consumer waste and post-consumer, is not recycled. That's hundreds of billions of dollars in annual economic opportunity. Yet nothing's happening. And the rate of capture is not increasing much.” – chair of Clareo and the Development Partner Institute, Peter Bryant

“To bring a new mine online probably takes 15-to-20 years. We think that recycling opportunities will produce revenues in three to five years.” – CEO of CoTec Holdings, Julian Treger

Financing the energy transition

“Last year in total, according to our statistics, US$5 billion was mobilised by junior and mid-tier mining companies globally. That’s debt and equity combined. That’s a rounding error of the capital that’s actually really required.” – mining fund partner at Denham Capital, Bert Koth

“If you're an explorer or developer … there must ultimately be revenue from selling rocks to someone. You can mine the equity capital markets and you can stay in that exploration phase of the Lassonde Curve but sooner or later you've actually got to get a project off the ground otherwise it's all ephemeral.” – chairman of Fenix Resources, John Welborn

“We [Australia] have got one of the three or four largest capital asset systems in the world; we’ve got banks collectively managing $4 trillion and we’ve got pension monies … $3.5 trillion dollars is more than enough capital to poke a stick at. It’s about getting the right policies and the right pricing signals. Finance is not going to do it for altruistic reasons.” – CEO of Climate Energy Finance, Tim Buckley

“What I would say about critical minerals is that we need to think differently about how we allocate capital. Our approach to discounted cash flow analysis, net present value, internal rates of return, doesn’t work so well for these types of commodities … And the principal reason is that you have one market player at the moment which at almost any cost is prepared to secure supply and build capacity.” – CEO of Sunrise Energy Metals, Sam Riggall

“I ignore pricing nowadays completely in my analysis. All I want to understand is where a new project will end up on the cost curve. Whatever happens to pricing, I just need to know that I'm going to be competitive in the long run.” – Riggall again

“In the last three years I've seen the equity market and the bank and the commercial financing appetite for critical minerals improve. The huge proviso is, only for certain commodities.” – director and general manager, institutional at Export Finance Australia, Dan Smart

“Comparing copper to tungsten or rare earths is a bit of a stretch. It is like comparing apples and oranges.” – director at the Critical Minerals Association Australia, Olimpia Pilch

“In my career I've not seen the amount of policy driven money that is currently available for an old industry – or call it the old economy.” – managing partner at Pacific Road Capital, Matt Fifield

“I would encourage Australian companies in the area of critical raw materials to dare to think big.” – special representative raw materials strategy with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Allard Castelein

“Maybe the car maker will be able to pay a premium but they need security also on the price. You can't have a system that works just one way.” – interministerial delegate on strategic metals and minerals in France’s Prime Minister’s Office, Benjamin Gallezot

“I think back to the iron ore industry when it started in Australia. There wasn't any spot market. It was all about long-term contracts with prices included in that. It was set, which allows investment decisions to be made by the mining companies. I think that's what we really need to see now.” – senior portfolio manager at AustralianSuper, Luke Smith

“If you're a junior you're operating on a pretty tight budget, and if you're a person like me giving you money then I want to see most of that money going into the ground.” – head of ESG investments at Peak Asset Management, Ali Ukani

“I think stakeholders in a community are not going to be celebrating a mine's social licence to operate. That doesn't mean that a mining company is actually delivering any tangible benefit to its immediate stakeholders.” – credit funds principal at Resource Capital Funds, Lauren McGregor

“Although you can’t always price good ESG behaviour attracting a wider variety of lenders is itself a very major benefit.” – CEO of EMR Capital, Jason Chang

Regulation versus returns: striving for balance

“We are very friendly but we are very rigorous.” – director of the Resources, Fuels and Clean Technologies, Department of State Development in South Australia, Edit Mucsi

“You can have the greenest mine on the planet but if it doesn't make any money it's not going to survive.” – senior legal counsel at South32, Kelly O’Rourke

“In a state where Rio blew up Juukan Gorge and where we have really obvious governance issues it's a bit rich for a miner to say that there's over regulation.” – chairman of Fenix Resources, John Welborn 

“At the moment there are real challenges. Twenty years to build a mining project is just far too long. There isn't a mining project in the world that has a positive NPV if you start it at minus-20 and capitalise those development costs.” – Welborn widening the lens on mining project timelines

“Nineteen of those 48 projects have been subjected to some form of legal challenge and a lot of that has been driven by publicly funded lawyers through the environmental defender's office and other organisations. So taxpayer funds being used to challenge taxpayer-funded planning approvals processes and taxpayer-funded projects.” – CEO of the New South Wales Minerals Council, Stephen Galilee

“Regulation and activists can delay projects with no regulation on the time frame. I think that's the real issue for the mining sector today.” – CEO of EMR Capital, Jason Chang