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Innovation is the new key to survival

[…]

At its most basic, innovation presents an optimal strategy for controlling costs. Companies that have invested in such technologies as remote mining, autonomous equipment and driverless trucks and trains have reduced expenses by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously driving up productivity.

Yet, gazing towards the horizon, it is rapidly becoming clear that innovation can do much more than reduce capital intensity. Approached strategically, it also has the power to reduce people and energy intensity, while increasing mining intensity.

Capturing the learnings 

The key is to think of innovation as much more than research and development (R&D) around particular processes or technologies. Companies can, in fact, innovate in multiple ways, such as leveraging supplier knowledge around specific operational challenges, redefining their participation in the energy value chain or finding new ways to engage and partner with major stakeholders and constituencies.

To reap these rewards, however, mining companies must overcome their traditionally conservative tendencies. In many cases, miners struggle to adopt technologies proven to work at other mining companies, let alone those from other industries. As a result, innovation becomes less of a technology problem and more of an adoption problem.

By breaking this mindset, mining companies can free themselves to adapt practical applications that already exist in other industries and apply them to fit their current needs. For instance, the tunnel boring machines used by civil engineers to excavate the Chunnel can vastly reduce miners' reliance on explosives. Until recently, those machines were too large to apply in a mining setting. Some innovators, however, are now incorporating the underlying technology to build smaller machines—effectively adapting mature solutions from other industries to realize more rapid results. 

Re-imagining the future

At the same time, innovation mandates companies to think in entirely new ways. Traditionally, for instance, miners have focused on extracting higher grades and achieving faster throughput by optimizing the pit, schedule, product mix and logistics. A truly innovative mindset, however, will see them adopt an entirely new design paradigm that leverages new information, mining and energy technologies to maximize value. […]

Approached in this way, innovation can drive more than cost reduction. It can help mining companies mitigate and manage risks, strengthen business models and foster more effective community and government relations. It can help mining services companies enhance their value to the industry by developing new products and services. Longer-term, it can even position organizations to move the needle on such endemic issues as corporate social responsibility, environmental performance and sustainability.

(http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ru/Document s/energy-resources/ru_er_tracking_the_trends_2015_eng.pdf)

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Mining tourism in Ouro Preto

Ouro Preto is surrounded by a rich and varied natural environment with waterfalls, hiking trails and native vegetation partially protected as state parks. Parts of these resources are used for tourism. Paradoxically, this ecosystem contrasts with the human occupation of the region that produced, after centuries, a rich history and a cultural connection to mining, its oldest economic activity which triggered occupation. The region has an unlimited potential for tourism, especially in specific segments such as mining heritage tourism, in association or not with the existing ecotourism market. In fact, in Ouro Preto, tourism, history, geology and mining are often hard to distinguish; such is the inter-relationship between these segments.

For centuries, a major problem of mining has been the reuse of the affected areas. Modern mining projects proposed solutions to this problem right from the initial stages of operation, which did not happen until recently. As a result, most quarries and other old mining areas that do not have an appropriate destination represent serious environmental problems. Mining tourism utilizing exhausted mines is a source of employment and income. Tourism activities may even contribute to the recovery of degraded areas in various ways, such as reforestation for leisure purposes, or their transformation into history museums where aspects of local mining are interpreted.

Minas Gerais, and particularly Ouro Preto, provides the strong and rich cultural and historical content needed for the transformation of mining remnants into attractive tourism products, especially when combined with the existing cultural tourism of the region. Although mining tourism is explored in various parts of the world in extremely different social, economic, cultural and natural contexts, in Brazil it is still not a strategy readily adopted as an alternative for areas affected by mining activities.

(Lohmann, G. M.; Flecha, A. C.; Knupp, M. E. C. G.; Liccardo, A. (2011). Mining tourism in Ouro Preto, Brazil: opportunities and challenges. In: M. V. Conlin; L. Jolliffe (eds).Mining heritage and tourism: a global synthesis. New York: Routledge, pp. 194-202.)