At the recent Future of Mining Summit in Gaborone, BW TechZone caught up with Lawrence Muzanenhamo, head of Technology at Abaricom, to talk about the company's smart mining play.
Muzanenhamo touched on how smart mining contributes to ushering in the new age of mining, what challenges have been prominent, and what role AI plays.
Please tell us about your current role at Abaricom
I'm the head of technology and smart mining at Abaricom. My role involves driving the value in technology within mining environments. So everything from connectivity solutions to looking at how mines can leverage technology to drive more efficient and safer mining environments.
What are some smart mining initiatives that Abaricom has embarked on?
One of our biggest projects was the first LTE-enabled network in a mine in Africa, which is basically the bedrock of smart mining. In smart mining, the one thing you need to get right is a stable and reliable network because you are able to connect all the elements, and then you can build on top of it.
We've been able to build very successful networks around smart mining using wireless technology, 4G and 5G. We have done quite a lot around enabling and providing a digital engine that enables the operators to put their systems and build on top of.
In terms of challenges around implementing smart mining solutions, which ones are the most prominent?
The biggest challenge is that people are adverse to change, especially when it comes to technology. This is because the general feeling is that when you bring in a new technology, it's actually going to replace people's jobs. So that's one of the biggest issues that you are going to face.
When we talk about things like autonomous mining, self-driving trucks and others, people tend to be quite averse to that. But what we're doing is trying to educate people about how you can move from doing things the old and unsafe way to seeing how we can upskill people.
Now, instead of going into a mine, driving a truck, or sitting on a bench behind the wheel for 12 hours, you can do that in a nice, air-conditioned office. There's no vibration, there's no noise for you. It is a nice, comfortable environment that enables you now as an operator, to remotely control the vehicle.
So the idea is to move the person from the mining environment and put them in a comfortable environment where they will achieve maximum efficiency.
How will smart mining contribute towards ushering Botswana into a new age of mining?
Mining is mining. The operations are the same. It's extraction, processing, and then you go to marketing. Our role is to make that entire process quicker and easier, so you give miners visibility into their operations.
It doesn't matter which mineral it is. Each one of those operations has its unique challenges, and we're trying to bring technology to cover that gap and give them the ability to make decisions quicker, be more efficient and be safer.
On the other side, by building these digital platforms, we're also allowing the expansion of the mining ecosystem. Now you're bringing in young, brilliant minds to come and start playing around with those systems, seeing how they localise and give value to whatever mining operation it is.
AI is currently the most referenced emerging technology. How are you incorporating it into your smart mining projects?
AI does the heavy lifting in smart mining. AI drives the training and simulations, whereby the algorithms create digital twins where you can map your mining operations and then make the change you want before actually getting into the mine.
AI even goes beyond that. You can now get real-time insights as to what the challenges are in your operation. So everything that we're doing, there's the connectivity layer, then you've got your systems, and those systems have data, and that data is what you then put the AI on top of to make sure that you get some actionable insights.
What do you think is the future of mining in Botswana?
We're already in the future. We have built the basic foundation blocks of what would be a future where people mine in suits, and then we receive information in real-time. We make decisions on the fly.
That is what I see smart mining being able to achieve, and then broadening the entire ecosystem by exporting the skills. Botswana is a very stable economy. It has access to a lot of infrastructure and resources. We have the capability of being the first movers around real, tangible, smart mining experiences.
And this is what we're driving towards as a company. That's what we want to do. We want to be pioneers and industry leaders when it comes to smart mining, and we're doing it.