Efficiency
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.
In open-pit mining, getting the right information at the right time can mean the difference between precise grade control and costly dilution - and one technology is giving operators a sharper, faster view of what lies beneath each bench.
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 Alejo Sfriso, corporate consultant at SRK Consulting Argentina, stepped up to the podium at the Life of Mine | Mine Waste and Tailings 2025 conference in Brisbane, his message was as direct as it was disruptive: it’s time to leave deterministic factor-of-safety thinking behind.
The future of underground mining could mean no one sets foot underground at all - a zero-entry mine powered by autonomy, interoperability, and constantly updated digital twins.
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.
When reliable environmental performance data doesn’t exist, simulation can step in – and according to IGO Nova’s Zachary Hearne, it could give Australian producers a market advantage.
