Enabling technology has made virtual solutions and remote sensing a reality and bulk miners in coal sectors are ready to jump on board the technological development that other sectors have already embraced with positive results.

Honeywell claims it has been at the forefront of the integrated management approach of technology, which seeks to harness automation to operate machinery and equipment, as well as communicate with personnel at a number of different sites around the globe at any time of the day.

The developments are not science fiction or the latest technological buzzwords, according to speakers at a recent Honeywell Users Group symposium in the Gold Coast.

Instead they have been proven to provide real bottom line benefits in the order of 13% to mining and oil and gas operations under demanding conditions.

“Mines are becoming larger so the complexity is not so much in the process but in the supply chain,” Honeywell Process Solutions Pacific sales director Garry Mahoney said.

“So a 1 per cent or 2 per cent improvement can deliver significant returns to shareholders.”

Consultant Andy Sherring, who was involved with advising Rio Tinto with its remote truck operation project and is being retained by BHP Billiton, believes follow through is essential if integrated operation centres can deliver value to mining companies.

“From a practical point of view it’s about improving, it’s about adding value and it’s about sustaining the value,” he told the symposium.

Honeywell Process Solutions Asia sales director Joe Spirito told Australian Longwall magazine: “If you look at what Rio Tinto is doing today with automated vehicles that is one way.

“We work in more specialised areas so our remote operations centres are really about getting collaboration.”

Collaboration

Spirito said the industry was becoming more receptive to collaborative solutions and had been impressed with Honeywell’s experience in establishing an integrated operations centre for copper miner Codelco in Chile.

Codelco went down the path of integrated management with Honeywell to ensure three of its copper mines in the harsh Atacama desert could operate at maximum efficiency without the need to strand the company’s experts in remote and inaccessible locations for protracted periods of time.

“With Codelco in Chile there are three remote minesites and one central facility in Santiago,” Spirito said.

“Their question was, ‘how do we use our experts at these sites when we’ve only got one expert?’

“With central and remote operations facilities there’s two areas.

“So we provide solutions to these problems: how do we get that expert to have oversight for those sites, how do I deal with a problem that is 600km away? And if I’ve got an expert that may not know everything about the operation how do I get information about other global experts?

“Collaboration is the story at Codelco.”

The more advanced integration model being proposed by Honeywell will form a central vision that the mine’s management from the very top would be linked to geographically disparate operations, giving them a common purpose and sharing real-time information with all stakeholders.

Not only would it deliver productivity improvements, it would also assist in the retention of trained staff and project experience and research that could be leveraged right across the organisation and the operation.

“It’s getting harder and harder to hold and retain people who don’t want to go and work at remote sites unnecessarily so the question is how you do more with less,” Spirito said.

“So one of the things that remote collaboration enables us is to utilise what’s in one person’s head across more sites and operations.

“The other thing it enables us to do is take that knowledge – as the workforce ages and that expertise is moving – and embed it in the systems that we have.

“So it’s about creating systems that don’t make decisions but support the decision making process whether its work breakdown structures or scope of work.

“From a maintenance standpoint that has been happening more and more now.

“What we’re trying to do is enable and facilitate that from a process end – so get that information out of people’s heads and put in the control space.

“That collaborative environment is not only a knowledge depository, it is a knowledge sharing tool.”

Some areas of the coal mining industry are moving ahead because they have to.

Spirito said they had multiple minesites and coal handling facilities and they had seen the effectiveness of these types of solutions in other sectors.

“They’ve got rising costs, recruitment problems, logistical issues,” he said.

“When you’ve got one minesite it is easy. When you’ve 10 minesites it can be very difficult.

“We’re seeing the growth of investment companies buying minesites and marginal assets around the world.

“They might buy a mine in Mozambique and a mine in Spain and they would ask, ‘how would we manage this financially and how would we understand what’s going on in different areas?’

“So they’re looking at the collaborative solution at the mine executive level.

“These companies need to leverage as much of their assets as possible because they typically hold onto them for short periods.”

Spirito said the coal industry had a number of challenges that were different to the hard rock or metals industry because bulk commodities created unique logistical problems.

“It’s about: how do I know what I got and how do I link what I know with multiple minesites and how do I get it to where I want it to go?” he said.

“One of our largest solutions is with BHP Billiton’s iron ore division where we have a solution set that links all their minesites, hubs and logistics for getting the actual iron ore out there.

“But now the same solutions apply to the coal solutions and now we are doing a lot of work in that coal space.

“If you look at the coal space it is not as complex as an oil and gas refinery but it has a different type of complexity.”

Logistics in the mining supply chain are important with bulk materials such as coal and iron ore.

“With other supply chains, tracking is more important,” Spirito said.

“For example, with copper you’ve got to track the material as it transforms through the concentrators and smelters into ingots.

“Until recently there were incomplete solutions across the value chain because it is a complex problem.

“We are getting a lot of interest around the world and the interest is high because in the past five years or so it’s been all about increasing the production volume … and then you struggle to keep up with infrastructure solutions.

“If you can squeeze 1 per cent out of your supply chain that is huge and you can do that by being smart.”

Underground coal

Spirito sees a big margin of upside in optimising longwall mining, which is well situated for automation optimisation.

“In the east coast of Australia, longwalls are the dominant form of operation and the interesting fact about the longwall is that it is as close as you can get to a continuous plant,” he said.

“So in terms of how you optimise it, it’s like optimising a coal prep plant. It’s unlike bord and pillar or an open cut mine where you have lots of discrete movements.

“A longwall goes up and down in a continuous fashion so they have lots of opportunities for improvement just like there is in the coal prep plants.”

In a way coal prep plants are five to 10 years ahead of longwalls, because they have had better access to data.

“Traditionally getting access to longwall data has been more difficult – not any more but it was,” Spirito said.

“There was also a problem from the maturity point of view, the coal prep plants have had a high need to use information systems to help them optimise.

“The other big areas is in [longwall] development, where sometimes it is not given the consideration it should have but that is a big bottleneck in the overall mining operations.

“It’s only been now that they have been able to get the data from the development machines to a centralised area where you can start reporting on it and optimising it.

“So with longwalls, its sheer optimisation and control, whereas in development it’s still just getting basic operations in place and measurement used for improvement.”

Infrastructure

Honeywell sales vice president Mark Zyskowski’s said: “From our perspective we have to be agile enough to react to where the market is going.

“One of the areas where agility is going to be necessary is the supply chain.”

There has been a crying need for this kind of solution to Australian coal infrastructure management for some time, according to Honeywell Asia-Pacific advanced solutions general manager Sam Crisafulli.

“There are different aspects to the supply chain,” he said. One is a combined supply chain so if you take the Port of Gladstone supply chain, that is a multi-user supply chain.

“So the total view … is the combined view of the coal producer, the rail company and the port.

“They each want to know what is happening but they can’t fully share the data.

“Another example of that is the Newcastle supply chain where they’ve actually got an independent organisation called Hunter Valley Logistics that actually manages the total supply chain on behalf of the coal producers so that they get the best result overall.

“Now they are using smart tools to help them but within that each producer has their own supply chain, each port operator has their own supply chain, each rail operator has their own supply chain.

“Each one of them has to have their own solution. You’re optimising throughput of the supply chain but within that each producer and each shipper has to operate their own throughput subject to their own rules and constraints.”

Crisafulli said not only could the company’s smart products improve productivity but products such as its mobile gas detectors could improve health and safety outcomes for its clients.

“Ensuring that someone has a ticket when they operate underground machinery when they log on to that piece of equipment links into the health and safety systems,” he said.

“That linkage doesn’t just happen so the linkage flow has to somehow be consolidated, ratified with a SAP database, a process database, vehicle information data, or personal gas detectors, location systems that make sure we know that a person is in a certain area and what the gas environment is and whether they have the appropriate classification and clearance.

“So it’s in the information space but it is really in the personal protection area.”

Honeywell will be breaking new ground and taking products to the coal market – from longwall optimisation to port optimisation – as it develops products for its clients from its Newcastle-based Matrikon acquisition 18 months ago.

Matrikon has worked closely with the coal mining industry to optimise supply chain management and develop real time operator monitoring systems.

Technology by Honeywell has paved the way for the real-time monitoring of operators’ performance that will provide data that can be used by the mining company or contractor to manage both the equipment and personnel to ensure safety as well as facilitate training and recruitment.

Honeywell senior systems analyst Ian Dixon said typically this data was analysed on an ad hoc basis if a piece of equipment was broken after the fact.

“What we’re going to now is getting the information in real time and preventing something from going wrong,” he said.

“When something goes wrong we can pick up on it straight away so you’re not waiting for those extended periods for the data to come in.”

Mobile Equipment Monitor provides mine operators with a way to monitor the operation and performance of their heavy mining equipment in real time.

This real-time visibility into the equipment’s raw sensor data and original equipment manufacturer and user-defined alarms and events provides a detailed view of the operation, status of the equipment and developing problems.

As a result, developing problems can often be identified and resolved before they result in equipment downtime or serious or collateral damage to the components.

Dixon said the product worked with third-party control systems and applications.

“On board the heavy mining machinery there is already the in-built sensors – they have already all the information from an engine management system so we’d be connecting to that and getting it across in real time,” he said.

“Rather than waiting for that to be downloaded manually, the analysis can be done instantly.

“It comes with a number of built-in reports, operator abuse reports, alarm reports.

“Rather than rely on the data supplied by the manufacturer of the equipment, the mining company can take the data and create a customised report.”

Manufacturers will have predefined reports such as operator abuse, brake abuse and other taboos, such as going at a certain speed while fully loaded.

“A lot of operator abuse is linked to machine abuse,” Dixon said. “So it could be used for operator training.

“When you have all this data you can start doing predictive analysis so you can stop things from breaking down and extending the equipment life.

“For example, instead of waiting 1000 hours to carry out maintenance on a mining truck, we’re looking to extend that to 1500 hours or 2000 hours so you will be halving your maintenance costs.

“This adds up to less maintenance hours, less maintenance equipment, less replacement of equipment.”

While this kind of software had been around in downstream processing plants, mining extraction companies wanted to come to speed on the technology, Dixon said.

“The mining companies were traditionally happy to fix something when it breaks but now that equipment is getting more costly and labour is getting more costly they want to spend this money to bring down their maintenance costs.

“So having that data available to them really enables them to do that through reliability maintenance.

“Simple things – like being able to do trending – is new to them.”

This article first appeared in the September edition of Australian Longwall magazine.