A senior manager at the Malmberget iron ore mine in northern Sweden has hailed the performance of 120-tonne battery-electric trucks 1.25km underground, described as the world’s largest and heaviest underground BE vehicles.
“This is what electrification looks like when it moves beyond demonstrations and into everyday mining,” said LKAB project manager electrification, Peter Gustavsson, who has been in the industry for two decades.
Gustavsson, in his current role for about five years, said two Scania 70t-payload trucks had transported more than 100,000 tonnes of iron ore over circa-1500 round trips during commissioning, operating an average seven hours and 45 round trips per charge and moving about 3200 tonnes per charge.
He said the trucks, with 624kW-hour batteries, were running on 800m-to-2.km loops between trucks chutes and crushing equipment. Zero to 100% vehicle battery charge with 375kW charging took about 80 minutes.
LKAB, which produces about 80% of the iron ore mined annually in Europe, sold more than US$3 billion of iron products in 2025 and $3.5 billion of minerals all up. Malmberget produces 15-16 million tonnes of run-of-mine ore and 5Mt of iron ore pellets a year.
LKAB also has the larger Kiruna underground iron ore mine in the Arctic Circle.
Gustavsson said the next step was using a BEV in 24/7 operation with a view to it demonstrating diesel-equivalent performance metrics.
“This is not a laboratory test,” he said. “This is a real underground mine.
“Real production. Real operators. Real tonnes moved.
“Building a 120t battery-electric truck is one challenge. Making it productive, reliable, safe and available 1250m underground, shift after shift, is the real challenge.”
LKAB wants to electrify 30% of its mining equipment fleet by 2027.
