Equipment Maintenance
A failed park brake piston seal was all it took to reduce a Whitehaven EH5000 dump truck to ashes – and the lesson, as Greg Fenton told the Mechanical Engineering Safety Seminar (MESS 2025), is one that should alarm every mining professional running large electric-drive fleets.
Even with control plans, take-fives, and risk assessments stacked high, mining engineers admit incidents still happen because the real world never plays out as neatly as the documents.
When mining operators are faced with the challenge of dewatering a live tailings storage facility (TSF) under 30 metres of cover, conventional engineering approaches often buckle under pressure - literally and figuratively.
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.
When Whitehaven Coal acquired BMA’s Daunia and Blackwater mines in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, it wasn’t just the company’s biggest purchase to date.
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.
If your underground mine is relying on 50 metres of non-line-of-sight vehicle detection, you may already be running outside your critical safety controls.
In a sector where “take-or-pay” contracts have long dictated how miners move their commodities, one new entrant is promising a more flexible model that puts the needs of producers first.
From the outside, the conversation around digital mining often gets framed in broad terms - automation, Information of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) but for those working underground or in control rooms, the real question is more practical: how do these tools actually solve the daily challenges?
For Stewart Johnston, Account Manager - Mine Electrification and Automation at ABB Australia, the key lies in making information usable, timely, and connected across the mining value chain.
