Cost Control
It’s not every day you hear about two massive shafts being sunk side by side in Australian coal country, each with its own design, equipment, and risks.
When Barry McKay walked into Ashton Coal and saw machines cutting stone instead of coal, he knew something had to change.
Deep underground in the Illawarra, a battery electric transporter called Driftex is rewriting the rules of coal mining by beating diesel on safety, speed and cost.
After a shaky start to 2025, the Australian exploration sector appears to be tentatively turning a corner.
As mining companies increasingly operate from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away from the pit or plant, one challenge has remained constant – how to give remote teams the same operational context, detail, and situational awareness they’d have if they were standing on site.
Every hour of downtime costs a mine tens of thousands of dollars, and Professor Amir Gandomi told the NSW Resources Regulator’s Mechanical Engineering Safety Seminar how artificial intelligence is now cutting those losses by predicting failures and optimising operations in seconds.
The future of Australia’s role in critical mineral supply chains may depend less on matching China’s scale and more on proving that secure, trusted supply with ESG credentials is worth paying for.
PLS’ Pilgangoora Operation delivered a standout June quarter, with production volumes up 77 percent and unit operating costs down 10 percent compared to the previous quarter thanks to the integration of the world’s largest lithium ore sorting plant.
Sensor-based sorting is no longer just a niche preconcentration step - it’s fast becoming a critical pillar of intelligent gold processing.
Rare earth metallurgy is unlike any other field in mining, and as Damien Krebs told AusIMM’s Metallurgical Society in his webinar Rare Earth Metallurgy 101, every single deposit is a puzzle that defies cookie-cutter solutions.
