In an address to the Melbourne Mining Club last week Biswas bemoaned the pace of innovation, while at the same time admitting he too had succumbed to the fast follower mentality.

His tips to the industry were to have the courage to think differently and experiment, to learn from others, collaborate effectively, and quickly adapt and adopt.

 “We like innovations that have been trialled successfully by others,” Biswas said.

“We all want to be fast followers. It’s easier to mount a business case when you can point to Exhibit A. I know this because I’ve been guilty of asking to see Exhibit A myself.

“And innovation, by definition, means disrupting our established way of doing things and that will often test our determination to get a result.”

Biswas said the challenges ahead meant miners would have to innovate faster.

He pointed to declining grades as well as declining productivity in the mining space.

“So we are spending more to move the tonnes and then there is less of the stuff that we want in those tonnes,” Biswas said.

He said mineral processing had a big role to play in addressing declining grades.

Part of that means being more selective about what is treated and the other is being more efficient in the processing of what is being put through the plant.

“The good news is that there is already some good work going on in this space and Newcrest was fortunate to be an early partner of CRC ORE, which is working to improve overall productivity,” Biswas said.

“In its first collaboration with industry a few years back, CRC ORE worked with our Telfer operation in the Pilbara on a large, structured experimentation program to identify at which point in the process we could liberate waste from ore.

“The first task in our experiment was to despatch half a dozen students and scientists out into the blazing Pilbara sun to shovel dirt for six months.”

That crew collected loads of samples and tests on the material showed the mining had been putting semi-autogenous grinding mill scats through the mill that were near tailings grade.

“Armed with that knowledge, we could then reject the scats, which boosted our processing rates by 20% and reduced unit costs with a very small impact on recoveries,” Biswas said.

“The beauty of the collaboration with CRC ORE is that they have now been able to share the learnings with other program participants who have benefitted also.”

Another challenge is the mining industry’s relatively low asset utilisation.

Biswas said work at Newcrest had highlighted the benefits data analytics brought to this area.

While data analytics has some enormous potential, it is still not being used heavily in the mining space.

Biswas believes there is a huge amount of potential for making better use of data science.

Taking part in hackathons has also paid off.

Newcrest collaborated with Unearthed and in August it set the challenge to see if surge events at its Cadia mill could be predicted.

“We’re pumping material pretty fast through our plant at Cadia and our operators were finding that our SAG mill would experience a surge at times that flooded our conveyor and would result in us needing to reduce our feed rate for a few hours, costing us valuable production time,” Biswas said.

“The trouble is we didn’t know what factors were that would lead to these events.

“So we got these teams to comb through the data to see if they could find the root causes within a large data set with around 100 different parameters.

“Within a matter of hours some of these teams came up with some very valuable insights and enabled us to begin making adjustments to the way we ran the mill.”

Biswas also talked about the collaboration that led Newcrest to develop the block cave at its Cadia operation.

“In the 1990s we joined an international caving study convened by the Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre with participation from CSIRO, Rio Tinto, Codelco and others.

“Together, this group spent a number of years trialling different caving techniques to help the rock fragment and cave more readily,” Biswas said.

“We also trialled different monitoring innovations so we could track the rock flow processes.

“We shared information with the study group and the result was faster learning by all participants and ultimately faster adoption of block caving methodology.

“I would like to stress that if it had been left up to any single one of us, we would probably still be refining the methodology today.

“By 2005 Newcrest had the confidence that it could safely and reliable develop block caves in deep strong, ground.

“And this enabled Newcrest to make the $2 billion plus investment decision that has transformed the company.”