Some said it was a race between the East and the West. Others suggested mining was now officially in a race against time. Either way, the industry’s technological advance is unlikely to continue at the 20th century’s snail’s pace over the next decade.
“We need a fundamental step change in technology in order to mine the metals that we need for seven or eight billion people,” Ivanhoe Mines founder and executive chair, Robert Friedland, told Resourcing Tomorrow 2024 in London.
“We’ve got 1.4 billion people on the African continent, roughly equal to China. India’s got 1.5 billion. They’re still making babies there.
“The Islamic world, 2 billion people; still making babies.
“Everybody wants everything, and to do that in a sustainable way is extremely metals intensive, and we need a better way, a greener way, a fundamentally different way, not only to mine those metals, but the way we generate and use electrical energy.
“Without that, as a species, it is game over.
“And so this is a very serious discussion.
“The mining history has this huge burden of figuring out a better way to mine much, much larger volumes of greener metals.”

There are indeed increasing signs technology is being taken seriously in the mining industry.
Exploration technology companies are raising hundreds of millions of dollars of equity funding. Mining companies have invested billions in autonomous vehicle fleets and are now pouring billions more into electrification of the machines. Traditional equipment manufacturers, big tech groups and private equity firms have spent more than US$7.5 billion in the past four years building mining tech arms.
“The innovation journey has begun,” Chrysalix Venture Capital partner Alfred Lam said at Resourcing Tomorrow.
“There are miners that do have an innovation mindset who are ready to engage.”
Yet outside perceptions of mining’s technological prowess remain underwhelming.
And the reality is that the industry, broadly, has barely scratched the surface when it comes to automation, digitalisation and cleantech.
Taylor Melvin, CEO of Friedland-founded exploration technology company Ivanhoe Electric, said: “We’re not going to find more metal through M&A and asset acquisitions.
“We actually have to go out and find more sources of copper and other critical minerals to meet the growing global demand. We have to find more of them more efficiently and more quickly and technology has to be a part of that.
“That’s what we’re really focused on as a technology-led exploration company. I see every day in our partnerships with Maaden in Saudi Arabia and BHP in the US the tenor of conversations has really changed with more collaboration and more embracing of technology as a part of our long-term solution to make our industry better.
“The other reason we need to do that is to attract more smarter young people.
“People want to work in cutting-edge, technology-driven businesses. We need to change the mindset of this generations-old industrial economy mining sector and be much more of a technology driven industry.”
Weir Group CEO Jon Stanton told Resourcing Tomorrow the industry had traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies.
“Generally the mindset has been, well, this worked for me before, so this is what I want again,” he said.
“Many mines are really, really inefficient and there’s a massive opportunity not only on new projects to build the mine of the future, but there’s a huge opportunity to optimise and do better on both productivity and sustainability at many of the existing mines around the world as well.
“We’ve got pretty unique perspective given that we operate on most major mines around the world, across all sort of commodities and geographies, so we see a lot of what’s going on.
“We’re trying to push for more of a technology shift.
“And it’s not that we’re waiting for some new mouse trap or something that’s going to come to solve the problem, because a lot of the technology is already here today.
“You can put together a concentrator today that will use probably 40% less energy than the traditional concentrator, 50% less CO2 and you need much less water. And that sort of concept is available today.
“So it’s not as if we’re waiting for something to come over the horizon; a lot of the technology is there. We just have to drive the adoption now across the industry.”
What, if anything, is going to speed that technology shift?
While there was more than one elephant in the room at Resourcing Tomorrow – AI was lurking along with mine waste and critical defence materials at different stages – China loomed as the biggest mining and metals disruptor.
It had already reshaped the landscape in the relative blink of an eye.
“I’ve been involved in critical minerals for about four years and in that time China’s market share has increased,” said Green Lithium CEO Sean Sargent.
“Even though we’re all talking about it we’re actually making very little tangible progress in terms of taking some of that market share.”
Michael Emond, mineral investment specialist at Western Australia’s Department of Minerals and Petroleum Resources, said aluminium was the “lithium of the 19th century”.
“It started out as a very exotic metal in the late 1880s but really came into its own during World War II when there was a huge demand for light metals for military purposes, for defence purposes, like we’re seeing today with other commodities,” he said.
“Post war there was this massive boom and need for aluminium, and that created this amazing exploration activity to discover deposits in Guinea and in Brazil, but there was no infrastructure to ship all that stuff to the smelters. So these companies had to develop their own vertical integration, develop their own shipping lines, to bring that to the fore.
“And then from that they went on to rolling mills and producing domestic products like aluminium foil and packages. There was then a lot of energy generated to try to break into the next level of consumer products … and these companies [Alcoa, Alcan, Comalco and Pechiney] went down the path of having their own engineering organisations that would not only build refineries and smelters, and smelting technology, but also provide railway design, aircraft [components] and so on.
“But that created, I think, a very rigid model that didn’t have flexibility that we really need today in order to adapt to a very changing and fluid world.

“And you saw in the 2000s the Chinese aluminium industry replicated the Western world’s industry in a 10-year period.
“They outpaced the rest of the world.”
Critical minerals consultant Amanda van Dyke said the nickel sector had seen an even shorter transformation.
“Right now a Chinese-Indonesian joint venture controls 30-to-40% at any given time of global nickel supply. And when you own that much of global nickel supply you’re calling the shots,” she said.
“Nobody believed China could build and economically process this dirty, low-grade material into a viable product. But they spent $10 billion or more building this capacity and they now control the global nickel market.
“We in the West were like, you just can’t do it. It’s dirty [and] it’s nasty. Nobody’s ever going to be able to process nickel pig iron. And they were wrong.
“I think that understanding of what’s possible and realising that a lot of our preconceived notions about what is possible and what is sustainable have to change if we’re going to be able to compete.”
A going out of business model
TechMet CEO Brian Menell joined others in suggesting business as usual simply wasn’t going to be a sustainable business model for many Western miners in future.
“To do our job as an industry, to adequately supply the world with critical minerals two years, three years, five years and 10 years out, we really can’t do more of what we’ve been doing before, particularly in the context of countering China’s dominance, which we need to,” he said.
“We can’t out-Chinese the Chinese.
“But what we can potentially do is out-innovate the Chinese and out-democracy the Chinese.
“We need to encourage innovation in terms of novel processing technologies and novel ways of using materials more efficiently in batteries and other systems.
“We really need to focus on doing things differently, not trying to do more of what the Chinese are doing and more of what we did last year and 10 years ago.
“It’s not going to work. We’ll continue to fail the world.”
The Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG), an organisation that emerged in North America more than 20 years ago and grew into Australia and South Africa and beyond, promotes itself as a “multi-stakeholder collaboration” facilitator aiming to accelerate technological and process change in mining for better productivity, safety and sustainability outcomes.
GMG chair Mark O’Brien said at Resourcing Tomorrow mining was an industry that needed to “grapple seriously with what the future holds”.
“GMG is in the early stages of validating the establishment of a Resources Futures Lab to … help us explore, as an industry, what the long future might look like and how we get there,” he said.
“Why is this so crucial?
“We are part of very complex supply chains for almost all aspects of the global economy.
“We are a critical part of the energy transition, both in offering key source materials required but also in being part of the emissions problem.
“We have complicated legacy issues to grapple with in terms of social impacts, safety, and environmental concerns.
“We are not agile as an industry so it takes us time to change course. Everything we do is massively capital intensive, and other issues such as approvals mean we have to start thinking now and taking action now to begin to seriously reshape what the industry looks like in 30-50 years.”
Singing from the same hymn sheet
Weir’s Stanton said collaboration, a buzzword increasingly taking commercial form in the industry, had never been more important in mining.
“We are talking here about [breaking out of] the echo chamber … I think there are lots of echo chambers,” he said.
“By and large the same thing is being said in each echo chamber.
“But we’ve got to get the siloes broken down. We’ve got to get the industry, the suppliers, the regulators, governments, communities, potential future employees aligned around what is needed in the industry, and to use that sort of collaboration and single voice, if you like, to then drive the policy changes that are required.
“We have to educate not only our employees and future employees. I think we have to educate governments and regulators, all of the stakeholders in the industry, on how mining can do things, deliver what is needed in the future in terms of critical minerals, but do it in a much better way than it has ever done before.
“And I think we’re in too many silos at the moment that really need to be broken down so that we’re creating a system-wide approach to delivering the solution.
“It reminds me a little bit of that famous [English comic duo] Morecambe and Wise wind-up where [Morecambe] said, we’re playing all the right notes but just not in the right order.
“We need to get a convergence of thinking around bringing in these new technologies.
“And really ignite passion about solving some of these existential problems, essentially, not only for the industry but for the future of the planet.
“So, stuff like, 3-4% of the world’s energy is used to make big rocks into small rocks. How do we reduce the power consumption that goes into mining?
“Water … Every mine has a water problem. Half of them have too much. Half of them have too little. How do we solve for these problems in different climatic zones around the world?
“Tailings is the biggest single waste stream on the planet. How do we reduce that waste stream through technology and how do we bring engineering innovation into the industry that’s going to help tackle these challenges?”
Veteran mining company executive and now technology investor through CoTec Holdings, Julian Treger, said mine waste valorisation represented one area where the industry’s challenges were generating significant opportunities.
“In my mind there are three reasons why this is super important,” he said.
“First of all, the opportunity is huge.
“In Canada alone there’s an estimated 10,000 mines which have been shut with tailings and the associated rehabilitation liabilities, largely sitting on the balance sheets of the provinces, is trillions of dollars.
“In Queensland [Australia] there are 15,000 closed mines with tailings.
“So it is a global, huge issue.
“Vis-à-vis the battle with China and the West, mining has been happening in the West for a long period of time. Those tailings are a historical legacy. It’s a way for us to deal with what’s going to be increasing weaponisation of metal elements going forward. We need to take advantage of the fact that our economies have industrialised for long periods of time and there’s a lot of waste available to be unlocked.
“And then, thirdly, I’ve never been seen a moment like today where there’s such disparity between the stock market perception of our sector and the strategic importance shown to it by governments and other strategic investors.
“Dealing with tailings and waste, dealing with eyesores that have been left as legacies by previous generations of miners, rehabilitating those, beautifying them and replacing them with something which looks much more acceptable to consumers, is a very important way in which the perception of our sector will be changed in the decades to come.
“It’s a way to show that we can not only harm the surface of the Earth but we can actually fix it up as well.
“So I think it’s extremely important to try and rehabilitate not only the waste but the reputation of our sector.”
Alasdair Graham, head of industry decarbonisation at Europe’s Energy Transitions Commission and a director of consultancy Systemiq, said a new report that identified key technologies able to “sustainably boost CRM [critical raw materials] supply” zeroed in on half a dozen technologies that could both lift copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, graphite and rare earth element output and cut mine footprints.
“They include things like primary sulphide leach which we think, just based on our flow sheet modelling, can produce 12% additional copper by the mid-2030s,” Graham said.
“Also DLE [direct lithium extraction], which is not really a technology it’s a group of technologies … But if you just look at something like geothermal DLE you’re looking at significant potential to bring down emissions, but also bring new volumes online, operating either in areas where we historically have not been able to do production because the conditions are not right, or where we’re producing big waste streams that could be arrested by these technologies.
“The second order benefit of that is not just what the technology is doing but what it can unlock, and that’s faster approvals, a better social license to operate, which you hear about from every single one of the speakers this week, and potentially expedited development times.
“Bringing all that together it’s kind of better, cleaner and faster.”