MINING.com sat down with Jeff Dawes, of CEO Komatsu, one of many world’s greatest suppliers of business gear to a number of industries to get his tackle how OEMs are getting on the sustainability observe, and why fossil fuels aren’t straightforward to stroll away from.
MDC: What’s the greatest impediment in your purchasers’ method?
Dawes: I’d must say sustainability if I needed to put one phrase on it, and the idea. One of many methods our prospects wish to obtain sustainability targets is to cut back carbon emissions in the usage of their gear. That’s our Scope 2 emissions and their Scope 1.
We’re serving to our prospects accomplish their targets by working exhausting to develop extra energy choices and introducing new applied sciences into our equipment. Fossil fuels are nonetheless a extremely essential energy supply. Our gear – in our present, close to time period street map we’ll be various energy, from hybrid sources, batteries, trolleys, hydrogen gas cells, no matter’s obtainable. We’ve fashioned an alliance with a few of our main companions known as the Greenhouse Gasoline Alliance. We’re working particularly on growing a zero-emission truck inside this decade.
Constructing on our dedication to cut back our carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, based mostly on the 2015 carbon emission ranges, we’ve additionally not too long ago introduced we’ll pursue carbon neutrality by 2050. A whole lot of our mining purchasers have made very particular commitments by 2030, so the necessity for options to fight local weather change – the strain is growing, yr by yr.
MDC: Such as you say, all people’s acquired a goal now – pretty formidable. On the bottom, how do you see this progressing? Is there sufficient lithium on the planet to energy all of the mining vans on the market?
Dawes: I believe it’s a course of. We now have completely little doubt in our minds that we are able to produce a zero-emission truck, however whether or not that truck will operate in a mining atmosphere is extra of a query of the mining firms’ infrastructure fairly than the truck know-how itself.
That’s one of many fundamental causes behind our Greenhouse Gasoline Alliance, was to work along with the purchasers proper now. We’re inviting them into the event course of a lot, a lot sooner than a number of the merchandise that we develop so they’re conscious of what they should do to be prepared for a zero emissions truck. For instance, you’ve acquired a mine with 70 300-400 tonne vans working, simply to affect these vans, they’re going to wish 50 megawatts of grain energy, simply to maintain up the aim of taking the digital engines out and a mine of that dimension most likely makes use of 35 megawatts – so its greater than doubling their present energy permits. That’s not going to occur in a single day, so they should begin serious about that proper now.
Trolley choices [are] a major infrastructure improvement, and hydrogen gas cells. [Miners] have to be serious about hydrogen monitoring crops and storage tanks. It’s a parallel improvement – we are able to develop the truck, they should work on infrastructure onsite to have the ability to use that know-how.
MDC: So the truck is nearly the final piece of the puzzle – the place the rubber hits the street?
Dawes: I believe that know-how is clearer – the roadmap in direction of that know-how is clearer for us than it’s on the infrastructure facet.
MDC: Know-how can also be altering fairly shortly – do you will have parallel R&D?
Dawes: We constructed the truck platform that shall be power-agnostic. You possibly can run it on a digital engine, you possibly can put a battery in it – you possibly can run it off a trolley, put a hydrogen cell in it- or a mix of all of these. The thought is to not restrict ourselves to a specific energy supply, however to have the ability to benefit from no matter [is] the perfect know-how obtainable at any given time, and in addition the choice to retrofit. When the [technology] comes out, we are able to improve with out having to vary the entire truck.
MDC: Investments in these vans will be fairly enormous, particularly for smaller players- are you lining them up for retrofitting?
Dawes: [Yes}, from our dash-5 series, the trucks we are building right now, we have a roadmap to transform them to a power-agnostic truck. It’s not going to be cheap, but it can be done. The first part is you work on the technology on how to do it more efficiently and cost effectively. We can do it, yes.
MDC: Are we in a supercycle, or not? There is talk from all corners – a sentiment, in the industry, of sorts.
Dawes: Mining is cyclical by nature, and we are riding a high at the moment – there’s no doubt about it. Despite the challenges of covid and everything else, it’s a pretty exciting time to be working in the industry.
Global demand for Komatsu products increased by 19% on a global basis in Q1, compared to last year. In North America, that increase was more than 40%. From our point of view – net sales, operating income and profit ratio are all on the right on the rise as we said in our last earnings call. However, I’ve noticed miners are far more conservative in this upcycle than they were in the last one.
The drop from that supercycle was almost cataclysmic. We’re expecting this to be a much smoother cycle. But we’re not seeing it going down, we’re seeing it going up.
MDC: With a link to sustainability, technology is changing, you see ‘for hire’ signs everywhere…are you finding, in your business, with your clients, a labour shake-up?
Dawes: Sure. There’s a big need in our industry to build a new pipeline of talent for the long term. The best way to do that is to increase interest both in our industry, and the skill sets needed for new types of jobs that will be available in the future – the industry is changing. We need to increase that – and maintain interest in the fact that mining provides really good, family-sustaining jobs, but we also have to recruit new types of talent for the high tech skills needed in areas like automation, robotics, computer programming, that hasn’t been traditionally important, but is becoming more so.
MDC: So someone who’s just finished his BSE in computer science – Komatsu might not be the first place he looks, do you feel you’re competing more and more with outside the industry for talent?
Dawes: Absolutely. Our industry has been a leader in automation for many years. We pioneered our autonomous haulage system in 2004 and our first commercial deployment was in 2008 at Codelco’s Mistrel mine in Chile. The industry has been in automation for a long time, and we have spearheaded a lot of the technologies necessary for automated vehicles. As an industry we’ve been recruiting talent for automation jobs for more than a decade now. People want to come to an industry where people have been working in this area for a long time. Mining is a great place to be.
It is true, however, that we have had to modify our recruiting strategies to include non-traditional competitors in the labour recruitment space. Covid’s helped us a little bit in that regard – it’s not only us, but other companies that are getting pushed down the road to remote work, which was something that we had in the pipeline.
We had pilot-type tests with it and now we’ve leaped in with both feet, and particularly in this area of technology it’s given us a leg up, because now we don’t have to get these people to go work in Tucson, where we have our technology headquarters. They can live wherever they want and jump on a plane once a month and go down to Tucson for a few to get together and that’s enough. That group of people is perfectly equipped to work remotely.
MDC: Do you have a feeling that is where lots of people will end up?
Dawes: That’s one scenario and that’s mostly the technology area. We’re a manufacturing facility. There’s a portion of our workforce that needs to work every day because we have to build stuff.
Here at our offices people come in usually 2-3 days a week. That’s on a business unit basis – they decide which days. It’s pointless going into the office to spend all day on a Teams call. That doesn’t make sense- so we design it as collaboration days and when everybody comes in they are collaborating. When they have their assignments, they go and work from home. It’s been working out pretty well for us.
MDC: At a time when there’s never been a great demand for metals and minerals [but] it looks as if there was a flip in opposition to the mining trade. How massive is the disconnect between the broader public, or the environmental foyer versus the trade itself?
Dawes: In mining there’s at all times been a necessity for a social license to function. Social license to function is a really inherent a part of the mining precept. By constructing group applications we are able to make sure that the wealth generated by mining will immediately profit the group surrounding the mine has at all times been part of growing any mine web site.
Any mining operation not solely has a duty to share the wealth generated through the lifetime of that mine, it additionally has the duty to make sure the advantages are lasting and sustainable even after the mine closes. We’re fairly aware of public scrutiny and a public strategy to new initiatives. On the similar time, what we’re seeing now could be a brand new stage of openness and transparency that I haven’t seen earlier than.
Mining can’t be carried out in secret. Mining is without doubt one of the most closely regulated industries on the planet, so the method of opening or closing a mine is a really public factor. I believe that’s a very good factor. Mining is a really basic a part of our lives – gathering a consensus on the event of latest initiatives or vital expansions is the way in which ahead.
There’s nonetheless a variety of work to be executed to attach the dots from mining operations to client merchandise and folks’s on a regular basis conveniences however there’s nonetheless a giant hole between folks’s expectations and what’s virtually possible. Everybody needs to see the day when the world stops utilizing fossil fuels, no person disagrees with that – the one disagreement we have now is on timing.
MDC: How do these messages get on the market?
Dawes: It’s a simple win for politicians to take a swipe on the atmosphere and mining. There are only a few politicians who’re brave sufficient to inform the reality and face actuality. All mining firms wish to be sustainable. There’s no person on the market that intentionally needs to break the atmosphere.
It’s only a query of – how can we try this in a sustainable method? We will’t cease mining tomorrow – most individuals don’t perceive the results, and I hope very a lot that we don’t see the results of it. The adverse angle by the general public and the politicians in direction of coal mining have meant that the share of the bottom load energy right here within the US that has onsite storage, which is basically coal energy stations or nuclear energy stations, have dropped to a dangerously low stage. If we have now a nasty winter right here within the northeast…individuals are going to die.
Sustainability. We’ll get there, however we’ve acquired to do it in a sustainable method. However we are able to’t try this with out most of the people understanding that this can be a course of that we have now to undergo. It must be a managed course of, or there’ll be some fairly massive bumps within the street forward.
There’s this hole between expectations and actuality. What we’d like are politicians to be brave sufficient. That may say; that is the tip sport, that is the place we wish to get and right here’s a street map to get there – not simply react to public opinion, regardless of what the truth is and whether or not it may be complied with or not.
I believe that mining firms do have an extended view of issues. These investments are very, very long run. When you make investments 7-8 billion {dollars}, you’re trying ten years forward. Politicians simply don’t look out that far.
