Nowadays the mining environment has changed dramatically; and has seen many new developments in automated mining technology, communications systems, computerized process control and worker safety monitoring.
Compared to manual forms of mining, automated mining is considered to be more sustainable for the foreseeable future. Automated mining helps achieves one of the critical milestone which is saving people from dangerous jobs including getting exposed to underground mining environment.
Almost every area of mining is set to use some form of automation within the next few years. Reports continue to suggest that industry demand for automated mining is rising rapidly. Blast-free and continuous gold mining at depths from 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) underground and below would become possible with automated mining techniques.
With much of the low-lying natural resources already picked, the current generation of miners is facing the prospect of having to drill deeper in more remote areas while also processing ore bodies of lower concentrations. This often means having to operate in more dangerous situations while creating more waste. The typical automated mining facility will have driverless trains, driverless trucks, remote-control production drills and remarkably, an operation centre located several kilometers away from the job site.
South Africa still has one of the biggest goldresources in the world, but it is at depth, which results in significant amounts of gold having to be locked up in shaft pillars and stability pillars, because blasting snarls up the ground conditions and creates dangerous seismicity. While South African gold mining has, by and large, not participated in the mechanized mining era, since the 1970s, the new steps are being taken to enable the country to leap from the current manual era directly into the automation era and completely bypass the mechanized era, where most of the global mining industry is currently stuck.
Statistics say over the longer term demand of minerals is projected to grow so quickly that innovation on an advanced level will be needed to help meet it. As many minerals and resources are commodities that have determinant prices that are established daily by global exchanges, the more efficiently companies extract and move them to market, the more profitable the company will be.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_mining
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