The Hub will actively bring together consortia of like-minded industry stakeholders to work on collaborative projects to improve the operational profitability of mines
Many mines face similar or identical technical challenges that, at best, unfavourably impact operational effectiveness, or at worst, can prevent a mine from operating at all. The Hub will be home to consortia which combine resources,dollars, time and expertise to address these challenges.
Forward-thinking collaborators will actively seek to understand the areas of greatest challenge as defined by industry, that if improved, can deliver the most value. The Hub then provides the ideal base from which to build, test and verify the best mechanisms for implementation of technology solutions developed.
Spearheading research and industry collaboration
The Hub provides a much-needed platform to independently test and validate technology to address common issues affecting the bottom line of mining operations. It also provides a mechanism to combine resources in terms of dollars, time and expertise to address these challenges.
While these challenges are often addressed independently, it is a resource intensive process, and often fails to reach the desired outcome. Many projects fall at the first hurdle and do not pass the approval stages.
Proactively bringing together consortia of like minded industry participants to share the mining research, testing and operational implementation is likely to provide earlier, meaningful and operationally validated outcomes sooner for the industry.
This approach supercharges the ability of individual organisations within the small to mid tier capital bands to finance, research, test and implement solutions that would otherwise be prohibitive.
Genuine collaboration and true partnerships are fairly rare in mining and often struggle to deliver.
What will attract collaborators to the Hub’s consortia is that instead of the traditional model where new technologies are “pushed” on mining operations, the Hub is actively seeking to fully understand the areas of greatest challenge on a mine site that if improved, can deliver the most value.
Collaborating for outcomes
An example of possible industry-led collaboration projects include:
- Grade Engineering® trials to determine amenability of deposits.
- Reduction in energy and water consumption.
- Improvements in processing through understanding deleterious mineralogy.
- Innovative integrated processing circuits to economically treat stranded assets.
- Investigative workshops to develop collaborative opportunities.
- Validation, testing and implementing gold sorting via Gamma Activation Analysis.
Participating consortia members benefit from decreased costs and insights from access to de-identified data and findings from all sites.
The Kalgoorlie-Boulder Mining Innovation Hub.
Furthering industry-led technology development in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
Kalgoorlie-Boulder Mining Innovation Hub early supporters include
