The Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration says a tighter workforce will be the result of increased international competition for qualified personnel if the number of mining education institutions continues to recede.

SME executive director Dave Kanagy presented on the issue last month at the Resources & Energy Investment Symposium in Broken Hill, New South Wales, framing familiar Australian labour woes in the context of the US mining sector.

Kanagy said that of the 160 million-strong US workforce, just 400,000 were employed in mining.

“Skilled mine labour is going to be a pretty scarce resource, good management is going to be a scarce resource, but unskilled labour will increase,” he said.

“We’re projecting 228,000 new workers [will be needed in the US mining industry] by 2019. Canada is going to be looking for 100,000 and Australia will be looking for 85,000 workers.”

Kanagy charted the average mining industry wage across all skill levels in Australia at $US50 ($A51) per hour, compared to $27.5 an hour in the US – a discrepancy that could be an advantage to Australia as international competition for skilled workers increases.

However, within the much-needed US pool of potential labour, numbers are expected to decline.

The average worker in the US is 40.7 years old while the average age of a US miner is 47.2 years.

Kanagy said that due to a hiring slump in the 1980s and 90s, a major reduction in available talent is on the horizon.

“Over the next 15 to 17 years, we’re going to replace 52% of the industry,” he said.

“That’s probably the best-case scenario, because there’re some scenarios that we’ve mapped out where it looks like we might replace 78% of the industry between now and 2029.”

Kanagy suggested diversification of mining labour to include more women, but focused primarily on the need for increased efforts to expand education options as mining schools continue to close and lose funding.

“What’s probably more important in the industry right now is mining industry professors,” he said.

“There’re about 120 professors at 14 mining schools in the US, and about 70 of them are 65 years or older. So there’s going to be a critical problem very soon with replacing those professors and teaching them.

“If we cannot replace them, we’re going to have a hard time keeping those schools alive because it’s very easy for a high-cost program like mining engineering to be taken away.

“Extractive metallurgy engineers are in even worse shape. I can probably count on one hand the number of schools that have extractive metallurgy still, because metallurgy has been consumed by material science programs.”

Kanagy said SME efforts to push for more mining education had even extended to the kindergarten-to-high school level.

“We’ve invested a lot of time and money in our Minerals Education Institute, which we now call our Minerals Education Coalition,” he said.

“The primary focus of our group there is to develop supplemental educational material that talks about minerals in our daily life, how important they are, how those minerals are extracted, and provide curriculum that earth science teachers can use in their classrooms.

“We’ve had some pretty good and significant impacts.”