Modern Mining January 2021

DIGITAL TRENDS

Digital technology trends for 21 st century mining The Sibanye-Stillwater Digital Mining Laboratory (DigiMine) and the Wits Mining Insti- tute (WMI) at the University of Witwatersrand hosted the annual DigiMine seminar in December 2020 with the theme, Digital technology trends for 21 st century mining’. Modern Mining’s Mark Botha attended the event and filed this report.

I n his keynote address, titled “A perspective on the future of mining: considerations for universities offering mining quali- fications”, Prof. Fred Cawood, director of the Wits Mining Institute (WMI), focused on the future of mining and on what the WMI is doing to address this future. In his research, Cawood adopted an approach of identify- ing current issues to see whether there are underlying trends associated with them. He then pursued the identified trends to interpret which future scenarios they could lead to and, more importantly, what the implications for risk or opportunity man- agement are. “In these future scenarios,” he says, “there may be opportunities, risks or challenges. In the case of opportu- nities, we simply need to carry on doing what we’re doing to align our work with the prospective future scenario.” The scenarios could also present risk, in which case there would be issues both within and without mining companies’ control.

Prof. Frederick Cawood, director of the Wits Mining Institute.

The Sibanye-Stillwater Digital Mining Laboratory (DigiMine) at Wits University exposes students to different technologies and environments.

These issues were then grouped into four cate- gories, namely business and operational issues (over which companies have control); political or sovereign

“In this case, the approach used in the research was to focus only on the issues we can control and to create awareness of the rest,” he says.

issues, which include aspects such as resource nationalism; sustainabil- ity issues, as well as “cross-cutting issues”, which fall in more than one category. “This exercise showed that there are more issues within company and university control than without. This is an important observation as it means that it is possible to work towards a better future despite some of the fac- tors beyond our control.” Dominant issues The dominant issues that could be controlled at the time of the exercise amounted to 28 in total, including technology adoption; automation; difficult operating conditions; the ‘politics of anger’, and poverty and jobs. He says that, in terms of technol- ogy adoption, the message is that “we are dealing with a structural shift,

36  MODERN MINING  January 2021