Industry Insights: New Challenges, New Tools
Latest trends in mining equipment
“When I started out in mining, everybody was running 100,000-hour trucks. Then the adage came along that you only need a 60,000-hour fleet, because after 10 years of fleet life, technology changes and your product becomes less efficient. Therefore, the thinking was that you should roll fleets over every 10 years so that you can introduce new technology. Now everybody is talking about life extension, rebuilds, reconditioning and new unit sales. The expectation is that your major mobile equipment assets are expected to last longer, and companies want 80-100,000 hours or beyond.”
John Schellenberg, Mining Product Manager, Trucks, Hitachi Construction Machinery
“We often see our mining customers thinking in terms of the broad picture. It might cost them a bit more today to invest in electrical or more technologically advanced equipment, but they have certain environmental and sustainability benchmarks they need to hit. If they don't invest in these benchmarks, they risk losing license to operate, be it social license or actual operating license.”
Iggy Domagalski, President and CEO, Wajax
“Liebherr has an electrification solution for all of our excavators and trucks, and one is under development for our dozers. The challenge is the infrastructure burden placed on the mining houses, and the shortage of available renewable power in country in general.”
Tom Juric, Divisional Director, Liebherr-Canada
“Onaping Depth is a significant project that is moving mining towards a sustainable future. The future of mining in Sudbury is deep mining, and this requires battery electric equipment and other advanced vehicle systems to access these ore bodies. This ore body was only financially feasible when the advantages provided by BEVs were made possible a few years ago.”
Stella Holloway, Vice President, MacLean Engineering
“Although implementing innovative solutions can be expensive, there are incremental gains companies can make through optimization. For example, there are digital tools for the optimization of slurry pumps where you can keep the pump in an optimal spot at all times, so it does not have to spin harder and consume more power.”
John Davidson, North American Regional Head of Capital Sales, FLSmidth
