A pilot digital mine in Saudi Arabia has given operator Ma’aden confidence in a technology toolkit it can take into a series of planned future projects in the emerging mining jurisdiction and its supply partner Hexagon a firm foothold in what shapes as a fast-growing market, IMARC 2024 heard.
Ma’aden, the country’s major state-backed miner, and Swedish software and industrial tech company Hexagon worked in what both describe as a collaborative alliance on mobile fleet management, operator safety and mine planning software implementation at Ma’aden’s new Mansourah-Massarah gold mine in Saudi Arabia’s west.
Senior vice president of Ma’aden’s Gold and Base Metals business unit, Duncan Bradford, said Hexagon’s technology was an important part of the company’s plan to manage low-grade openpit ore feed into a four million tonnes per annum processing plant that includes Saudi Arabia’s first autoclave. It also had a relatively inexperienced, contractor-based mining workforce.
Waste and ore movement, and precise ore blending, were critical to mine and process economics.
Advanced Hexagon operator fatigue management systems combined with computer-guided vehicle traffic control contributed to safety and productivity outcomes.
“We’ve got direct monitoring of the waste and ore polygons in the openpit [two pits] so we know what we’re mining and where we’re going to track it,” Bradford said at the conference.
“We’ve got real time monitoring of our live stockpiles, leading to ROM [run of mine]. Further to that, we’ve got the fleet management system, which is helping with … traffic management of trucks going to the various ROMs and the various [stockpile ore] fingers.
“We’ve got real-time equipment data, productivity figures, the traffic management and finally the fatigue management system of the trucks, [showing] whether the truck drivers are dozing off or going to the wrong location to dump the material, [which] has been a big benefit.”
Bradford said productivity, safety and other data had been effectively collected for four-to-six months. With 12 months of data he hoped to “see the full gain that we’ve realised from the Hexagon system and how we’re minimising our dilution”.
Australian mining engineer Bradford has held senior operational and group management roles, including for Nevada Gold Mines (Barrick Gold/Newmont) in the US, at the Jabal Sayid copper mine in Saudi Arabia (Barrick/Ma’aden) and with leading international mining contractor Byrnecut, over more than 30 years in the industry.
He took up the divisional VP position at Ma’aden in 2022.
The group is expanding phosphate, aluminium and gold production in Saudi Arabia, and expanding offshore through the Manara Minerals joint venture with the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
A large new gold project, Ar Rjum, is the next significant piece of a Ma’aden plan to double annual gold output to 1 million ounces over the next six years.
“I’ve spoken with Hexagon on how I am going to digitise and automate my future operations, not only the Mansourah-Massarah openpits,” Bradford said.
“Our strategy team are working on the feasibility study for a number of satellite pits that are 10-to-20km away [from the Mansourah-Massarah hub].
“So I’m speaking with Hexagon on how we are going to automate that system to take the human factor out and have autonomous trucks running between those.”
Hexagon is deploying new autonomous, high-capacity mine roadtrains in Western Australia.
“In addition to that, it is a little bit early to say how good it is, but we are drilling at depth underneath Mansourah-Massarah at this stage,” Bradford said.
“We want to have a fully digitalised, somewhat automated underground operation when we go down the hole.
“We’re also in the final stages of our next [bankable feasibility study] for Ar Rjum, which will be double the size in terms of tonnes moved, compared to Mansourah-Massarah.
“So what we’re learning here we want to replicate over at Ar Rjum. Double the fleet size and although not as complex an orebody, we need to have the systems in place so when we install them at Ar Rjum they are up and running [from day one].”
Bradford said compared to a “hard-money EPCM contract” for the Mansourah-Massarah processing plant, Ma’aden’s negotiations with Hexagon were based on indepth collaborative project scoping, planning and resourcing.
“We never discussed costs,” he said.
“We just discussed the vision of what we wanted to do – and we’ve still got a lot of things in the pipeline for Mansourah-Massarah and future development.
“So really it is about communication and understanding what Hexagon can do for us and also what Ma’aden can do for Hexagon, to get the systems into Saudi [and] get the infrastructure into Saudi for these systems to work.
“One of the issues we found – it’s not Hexagon’s issue – is we can put in all the digitalisation and automation in the world but if we don’t have the backbone of a good data signal and system at these mines, everything fails.
“So we’ve learned the hard way at Mansourah-Massarah, making sure our backbone is right for these systems to work.”
Hexagon executive vice president, mining, Dave Goddard said Ma’aden presented the tech company with a “unique opportunity to … really create a clean sheet of what the digital mine would look like”.
“We were able to sit down before any earth was actually moved and line out what all of the applications were that we had that would improve the productivity and make the economic business case for this property,” he said.
“Being able to have that partnership at the very beginning, have a seat at that table and be able to collaboratively come up with a plan that is going to extract the maximum amount of value from that asset that’s under the ground, was a really, really neat opportunity for us.
“It was very transparent and I think that’s what is really unique about the partnership that we have.
“We can be very clear about where the value proposition is for the products that we offer, how to reduce the dilution, how to optimise the value of the asset in the ground, and then how to manage the extraction activities that happen on a day-to-day basis in a manner that ensures that there’s no value leakage from the process.
“Being able to say, okay, here are the limitations of the system – here’s what we can do, here’s what we can’t do – and then on the operational side, having Ma’aden be able to say, okay, we can accommodate that limitation on the digitisation portion of it by doing this other process.
“The give and take is something that I think is really exceptional.”
