Next generation potash includes digital revolution underground
Theuns Roux’s brightly lit office is on the third floor of one of the oldest buildings in Saskatoon.
The Birks Building was cutting edge when it was built in 1929, and in a way, it is again, housing as it does a colourful, futuristic openconcept workspace that wouldn’t look out of place at a Silicon Valley tech firm.
Just a few blocks away, Saskatchewan’s newest office building will soon start to rise. Destined to be the tallest building in the province, Nutrien Tower will be a glass and steel landmark along the South Saskatchewan River testifying to the importance of potash in the province.
Roux works every day at the intersection of the old and the new; the past and the future of the mining giant.
As the senior director of Full Potential Transformation at Nutrien, he is charged with helping shape the future direction of the company’s potash innovation strategy.
The world’s largest potash producer has big plans to use technology to drive a push for more safety, reliability and efficiency, and Roux is tasked with leading the way.
“We recognize where we are today in the potash industry – and the mining industry as a whole – from a digital maturity perspective we are pretty low on the curve,” said Roux.
Industries like oil and gas are also pretty low, but generally slightly more technically sophisticated than mining. Manufacturing is higher still on the digital technology curve, and media and telecommunications are way up there, he said.
“Now, we’ve tapped into some research and understand what some of the things determining digital maturity for us are as a mining organization, and specifically in potash.”
The opportunity for Nutrien is to leapfrog a lot of the technologies that are already out there.
“Since we work one kilometer underground, we will need to take a lot of these technologies and adapt them to the environment that we work in. This will be a key strategic position for us in the future.”
But how automated can potash mining become?
“Don’t expect humans to just disappear,” Roux said. “People are always going to be critical to this, and even when we are talking about machines being operated autonomously, we also need to remember that the equipment that we are talking about automating is always going to have to be maintained. It will look and feel different in the future, but we are still going to need teams that have to do, among other things, maintenance underground, etc. And don’t forget, with all this technology that we are talking about, there are many other and new jobs that will be created.
“The operating philosophy of a mine in a decade will be very different than the operating philosophy of a mine today.”
What Nutrien is calling next generation potash is a process of transformation that will take a couple of key step changes.
Improving operational excellence is the first step.
“Nutrien is in a really good position because we’ve invested a significant amount of money into our asset base over the last decade,” Roux said. “So, we have world-class asset bases, but it doesn’t mean we are currently extracting the full weight and capacity out of those assets today. So operational excellence will help us unlock immediate value that will require no, to very low capital to unlock our latent capacity.”
The team is focused on all operations, with an example being at the Rocanville operation to look at the process of how it does its mining to extract the highest quality ore grade.
“Not all potash is created equally, as ore grade differs across the mining face, therefore it is important to identify the optimal ore line every time. As an example, every per cent increase in grade represents about $50 million USD run rate value a year, so for every one per cent that you miss, there’s a huge impact. We did an audit on 28 rooms across our site, and we asked if we were actually hitting our optimal ore grade all the time? The answer was we were missing about 1 to 1.4 per cent of that optimal ore grade, on average.
“So, we got the team together and came up with a way of changing the process,” Roux said. “And in this case, it was tapping into one of our most senior and mature operators that’s been doing this for years, and he said these are some things you need to look for. Together we developed a cheat sheet, changed the process of what people need to look for, and today, consistently for the last seven months we have been hitting on average a 1.3 per cent increase in that optimal ore grade, resulting in many millions of dollars in run rate value for the organization. So that’s a good example where we spent no capital, but we changed the process and that essentially gave us a significant amount of value.”
Roux said there are many opportunities to use technology to achieve efficiencies.
A worker simply going down the shaft, getting into a vehicle and going to the boring machine can take up to 90 minutes at some of the mines. Rocanville is an underground city roughly the size of Saskatoon, for example.
Knowing exactly where the vehicle is situated, and whether it is fuelled up or charged can reap rewards.
“It’s a small thing, and it might take off five or 10 minutes, but optimizing those opportunities to get to that machine means more up-time for our machines, meaning more ore. Again, no capital, just changing process and ways of working.”
The second pillar of Next
Generation Potash mining is digitized operations.
It’s all about finding ways to take manual processes and applying technology that can now support the work.
“So instead of having a process that a human needs to follow every time, and there can potentially be human error, how do you apply technology to assist humans to make better and more timely decisions to do that job consistently well. Examples include advance analytics and Internet of Things (IOT).”
The third piece to the next generation of potash mining is digital transformation.
“This is really the opportunity we are taking to redesign and redefine in certain areas, the things we do,” Roux said. “Among those, we’ve spent a lot of time with our operations’ folks talking about what it is they see will unlock future value for them and make their jobs safer and easier.
“We have five digital destinations we landed on specifically that we’ve prioritized as a team. At a high-level those five are: autonomous mining operations; advanced process control; planning and dynamic scheduling; connected workforce; and predictive maintenance. Those five digital destinations are all about how we embrace technology, to unlock step change value.”
Roux said investments are being made today to set Nutrien up for the future, knowing that this is a multi-year journey, with a sharp eye on the next five years.
“The three main pillars are essentially the program, but it is pertinent to note that it is people who actually make this happen, so there’s a huge change journey that’s underway and making sure people come on the journey and believe in it, especially operations, what this means for them and how they get involved is crucially important.”