Imagine being hundreds of metres below the earth – nearly as deep, in fact, as the Burj Khalifa is tall – when something goes wrong. An explosion, you guess, from the muffled crash somewhere in the darkness nearby. And then you hear another noise.

Though you don’t know it, that’s the sound of stone and dirt and mud, altogether weighing about the same as five city buses, collapsing round your ears. Then, finally, there’s silence, except for the sharpness of your breath and the beating of your heart.

This might sound like a fever dream. In fact, it’s what a real group of Chinese gold miners suffered earlier this year. Working in the coastal province of Shandong, 600m underground, a pair of explosions ripped through their shaft. About 70t of debris hurtled towards them, smashing escape lifts and trapping the workers half a kilometre from safety.

Even days after the disaster, rescuers weren’t even sure any miners were left alive. Finally, though, they made contact with a group of survivors. After another week of effort, 11 miners were finally evacuated alive. Around a dozen of their colleagues, though, were less lucky.

A depressing story. But what’s probably more shocking is just how often it’s repeated. Similar mine collapses have recently struck Chile (2010), India (2013), Turkey (2014), Mexico (2018) and the US (2020), among many other places.

And though not every accident ends in fatalities, the numbers are still bleak. According to the International Labour Organisation, mining accounts for 8% of all deadly workplace accidents, despite employing just 1% of the world’s workforce.

Not that the situation is hopeless. With the support of a local gold mine, one South African NGO is developing new ways to extract underground miners quickly and securely when disaster strikes – with lessons the world over.

Rescue equipment needs to respond faster and go further

Drive south-west from Johannesburg and you’ll go by many standard scenes of South African life: poor suburbs, breezeblock townships and shrubland the colour of weak ale in the sun.

But if you turn left off Randfontein Road, past the piles of landfill and the trucks rumbling in the other direction, you’ll finally reach something extraordinary. Known as the South Deep Mine, it is one of South Africa’s largest gold mines and contains the deepest single-drop shaft on the planet.

Tumbling 3,000m below the earth’s surface, it takes lifts six minutes to reach the bottom. Workers complete the trip in cage lifts 9m in diameter, and when they arrive temperatures at the rockface can reach 50°C.

Not that the South Deep, operated by Gold Fields, is totally unique. Eight out of the ten deepest mines in the world are located in South Africa, something Mannas Fourie says has historically posed major challenges for mine operators and workers – especially when it comes to rescue equipment.

“If you look at what we currently have in the industry, we have a rescue winder that could go down to 1,200m,” explains Fourie, CEO of MRS Training & Rescue, a South African NGO. “That limited our capabilities if something had happened below that depth.”

Instinctively, this makes sense. After all, why have rescue equipment that can only go halfway down a shaft if something goes wrong? That’s especially true given the many dangers of life underground, from fires to fly-rocks to toxic fumes.

More fundamentally, though, grasping Fourie’s point requires you to understand how important speed is to any extraction. With traditional equipment, rescuers have to lift miners several hundred metres, then drop them off on a platform, then repeat the same process once or even twice more.

And because older winches can only carry a single miner at once – all at a leisurely 0.8m per second – you’re potentially looking at dozens of trips up and down a mine shaft.

Things risk being even slower if, like many rescue winches, you first need to hook the system up to the mine’s power supply. “If you look at the critical time to rescue people,” says Fourie, “you haven’t got that time to waste.”

As the famous ‘golden hour’ rule states, receiving treatment within 60 minutes of a traumatic injury increases the chance of surviving by over 80%. And though exact statistics are scarce, Fourie’s broader argument is mirrored by incidents at specific mines.

For instance, after a 2006 collapse at Sago, in West Virginia’s rugged coal country, 13 workers were trapped. Rescuers finally reached the group 42 hours later – but it was too late for all but one of the miners, the rest of whom had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In other words, it’s unsurprising that operators are always on the lookout for ways to get staff out quicker. “We never put a price on the safety of our people,” emphasises Martin Preece, executive vice-president at Gold Fields. “I think the priority is to get every one of our employees home safely every day.”

A new type of rescue winch

In January 2021, the South Deep hosted a red-letter day in the world of mining. Supported by workers from Gold Fields, Fourie and his team at the MRS tested out a new kind of rescue winch, the climax of a project that had begun nearly a decade ago.

Exploiting the twin shaft’s colossal depth, the MRS put this new rescue winch to the test – and zipped the full 3,000m to the bottom of the mine in one swoop.

“It allowed Mannas to take the equipment to its maximum capability,” explains Preece regarding the experiment’s location. “It’s an insurance policy that’s well worth the investment in our view, and that we hope we’ll never need to use.”

Of course, going the distance is a great start: no longer do rescuers have to stage extractions across several arduous legs. But the so-called mobile rescue winder improves on existing models in many other ways too.

For one thing, there’s the speed. Capable of travelling at 1.5m per second, it goes at nearly double the clip of older equipment. Then there’s its size. Robust enough to carry up to six miners at once, the winder is able to bring far more miners to safety quicker.

With statistics like these, Preece is unsurprisingly bullish about the depths of the equipment’s potential. “I’d have absolutely no hesitation plugging into one of these winders – and having full confidence in what the guys have designed.”

At the same time, Fourie and his colleagues have worked hard to make their equipment effective in other ways. Doing away with cumbersome mine-powered approaches – as well as hydraulic alternatives that required operators to fiddle with pressure valves as they descended – the MRS machine is run through a self-contained generator.

In practice, that means rescuers can get down to the business of actually helping miners even sooner, particularly useful in countries like South Africa, where power cuts are fairly common.

Even better, Fourie has clearly thought about rescue missions as a collective enterprise. With rescue winders stationed in Carletonville, just north of several gold mines, he says a team can be deployed within the hour.

Collaboration is another important piece of the puzzle. To secure a licence for the new platform, for instance, Fourie says that MRS worked closely with the South African Department of Mineral Resources and Energy.

Arguably even more important was liaising with trade unions, as well as the miners themselves. Given these are ultimately the people actually risking their lives down the shaft – and the ones who’ll be relying on the MRS to save them in case of emergency – this seems wise.

Happily, notes Preece, the initiative got an “overwhelming thumbs up” from workers, who even sung the system’s praises to the local news.

South Africa’s rescue winch could be the way forward for winders

With the mobile rescue winch now safely deployed in the Gauteng gold fields, what about its prospects elsewhere? Though it was only unveiled a few months ago, Fourie says he’s already received messages from Australian mining interests developing their own model of winder – albeit one with a far smaller range than its South African cousin.

US mines have been in touch too, Fourie adds, something he suggests could be the start of a far broader trend. “I think that the world will follow,” he says. “It’s a good initiative and relates back to safety.”

Whatever happens to the mobile rescue winder, it’s clear that similar systems are here to stay. In February 2020, for instance, Levitt-Safety, a Canadian equipment company, hosted the world’s first Canadian International Student Mine Rescue Competition. Among other things, the students had a chance to rescue trapped actors from a mock mine.

That’s shadowed by work by Gantner, an Austrian company, which a few years back installed a state-of-the-art rescue winch at a mine in Tasmania.

All good news – especially if it can stop the Sagos and Shandongs of the world from taking more young lives before their time.

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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Everyday users of mobile phones aren’t the only ones awaiting the much-hyped arrival of universal fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. The mining industry also sees an exciting opportunity for evolution as it continues to invest in new technologies, with high speeds and real-time connectivity opening the door to a revolution underground.

One major player facilitating the introduction of 5G is Verizon. Robert Le Busque, vice-president for the company’s Asia-Pacific operations, says the technology offers miners a unique and valuable opportunity to drive the sector towards a digital transformation, especially in core markets such as Australia.

“We know that Australia’s mining industry plays a huge role in the country’s economy. The mining sector is a perfect example of how new technologies, such as private 5G, can transform an entire industry and keep Australia at the global forefront.”

Le Busque says 5G has the potential to deliver the high-speed connections needed to support a wide range of new applications that require more performance than 4G can deliver.

“Over 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE), network latency – the time it takes for a data packet to make a round trip between two points – was cut in half from 3G, with response times from 15ms to 60ms versus 120ms. That remains the industry benchmark. But over a 5G network, latency could drop to 10ms, making lag times nearly undetectable.”

Combine this speed with scale and automation, and the technology comes into its own: 5G can support up to one million devices per square kilometre. These capabilities were unthinkable in a 4G world. “The shift from 4G to 5G is massive,” Le Busque says.

5G and automation could revolutionise mining

Morgan Rody is the senior project manager for automation and interoperability at the technology and digital division of equipment and infrastructure specialists Epiroc. He says 5G could revolutionise mining on a number of fronts, including accelerating ongoing efforts to implement automation.

“Fewer human workers underground always equals increased safety. As autonomy gains traction and proves to safely increase production, we will see fewer human workers in the underground environments and this will be a direct result of
the inclusion of 5G,” says Rody.

“This is not to say autonomy can’t happen without 5G, but for it to happen at scale, there needs to be more bandwidth available with increased reliability. A handful of machines can be successfully autonomous today using 4G or Wi-Fi, but if we are to increase that to a fleet of 20, 50 or more machines, 5G will be a vital component in that journey.”

Rody notes that the technology will also enable control rooms to move above ground. “Again, this is already happening today, but larger and more centralised control rooms – perhaps connected to and controlling a number of mine production sites globally – will become the new normal.”

Le Busque says 5G is the ideal technology to drive automation forward. “In its most basic sense, a simple boost in wireless speed and bandwidth improves responsiveness,” he explains. “Many machine-focused applications require a high level of integration
and interaction between individual devices and controllers or servers.”

The amount of data that must be transferred and aggregated to support real-time machine applications – such as industrial automation and autonomous vehicles – is enormous. As these application ecosystems evolve, it is likely that they will become even more hungry for bandwidth to deliver improved business outcomes.

Rody also flags the arrival of large-scale audio-visual technology. HD video, for example, could be transmitted from mining machines to control rooms with zero lag.

“By creating communication ‘lanes’ you can split video, telematics data, near real-time data and command critical data, creating an efficient network where the ‘lanes’ cannot interfere with one another,” he says.

This increased visibility and separation will further enhance safe and successful automation.

Le Busque points out that there are also significant benefits in terms of security. “5G itself doesn’t introduce new risks; it is simply a means of transporting internet protocol (IP) traffic,” he says. “One of the big differences with 5G is that a lot of the learnings from 3G and 4G when it came to security have been embedded into 5G architecture.”

The standard – created by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) – is centred on security. New capabilities and architecture concepts have been built into 3GPP and subsequently used for 5G to help safeguard network transport.

5G also enables Zero Trust, a concept that ensures no component of the network can execute an action or transmit data to another entity without authentication
and authorisation.

“Additionally, 5G incorporates comprehensive encryption standards and encryption methodologies, so data is secured and encrypted in transit,” says Le Busque.

Companies will also be able to use 5G to improve efficiencies. Le Busque says real-time data will be more readily available via mobile apps to facilitate predictive maintenance and cut equipment downtime. Improved connectivity and better data processing power across more devices will pave the way for more responsive supply chains that have greater visibility of production.

Helping companies reduce their carbon footprint is another positive benefit. “Mining sites can manage energy and control emissions by monitoring heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems, reduce unnecessary use and provide timely maintenance,” says Le Busque.

Local and national authorities will need to work together to ensure even coverage

Rody says some mining operators will be better placed to benefit from 5G technology than others, given the variance in local infrastructure standards. Cooperation and collaboration between the industry, governments and telecoms companies at a local level will be vital to a successful rollout.

“Any wireless network requires a number of access points or towers – or a mixture of both – and these need to be placed throughout the target environment so they offer the best coverage,” he says.

“We are seeing that the host country can provide the 5G network to the mine site and then it is up to the mine to supply the remaining infrastructure. So here we see a mix of host country public and private mine infrastructures working together. This is quite new in the mining industry and more telecoms operators are starting to see the opportunities here. Their participation in this is important.”

Le Busque agrees that this local buy-in is crucial and says policy is now keeping pace with innovation, with governments providing incentives for system integrators and solution providers to invest in the technology.

He cites 5G innovation grants in Singapore and the allocation of private 5G spectrum in Australia, Germany, the UK and Japan as examples of how governments, regulators and industry are working together.

Support has been particularly strong in Australia, a key market for Verizon and a global mining powerhouse. “The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is facilitating a variety of licence types in the 26GHz and 28GHz bands (mmWave) for the deployment of 5G technology,” says Le Busque.

“The regulator also plans to include area-wide apparatus licences (AWLs), class licences for low-power devices and spectrum licensing in the 26GHz band to cater to the deployment of dense networks in areas that are highly populated.”

It’s envisaged mmWave in the 26GHz and 28GHz bands will support a wide range of 5G uses across the transport, health and education sectors in addition to advanced manufacturing and mining. It will also be used for wireless broadband, satellite communications and the internet of things.

The rollout is ongoing but challenges remain

Since October 2020, Verizon has been working on an international private 5G business platform for Europe and Asia-Pacific. The launch project – in partnership with Nokia – promised businesses a private industrial grade dedicated 5G network capability on their own premises.

Each private network would be self-contained and house its own components – including micro-towers and small cells – on site. It would connect to a local area network (LAN) and other applications. It’s this type of setup that miners are looking to exploit. Currently testing is being done on 4G LTE hardware and networks.

“How that will differ from the final 5G infrastructure is not yet finalised and this is something that is evolving as the testing progresses,” says Rody.

While trials have been under way at various sites worldwide for a number of years, the actual pace of change has been slow. “This is normal in the mining industry – fast adoption of any new technology is not what the mining industry is known for,” Rody says.

“We see the main push coming from global players that have high ambitions for mining automation and have already trialled automation solutions for a decade or longer. In the past two years, interest in 5G technology has increased and there are more trials planned in 2021 and 2022. I think a wider uptake will be in direct connection to a mine’s autonomous ambitions.”

However, hurdles to the large-scale integration of 5G remain. Rody says that in addition to winning backing from telecoms operators at a national level, there’s a need to build up the right competencies in terms of using and understanding the technology.

“Although there are some similarities between a Wi-Fi network and a cellular network, there are still a great deal of new configurations available and here there is a
clear knowledge gap,” he says.

“Getting telecoms operators and mines talking together in the ‘same language’ is also an issue we face and here a lot of patience is required on both sides. A great deal of this is still new territory, but together we are taking huge steps forward towards a joint 5G future, which will help deliver safer mining sites with large scale autonomous fleets producing more ore than ever before.”

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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The holy grail for miners is to solve the energy trilemma: how to generate the power they need to run their operations in an affordable, secure and sustainable way. While renewable energy sources such as wind and solar tick the final box, it is only in very recent years that technologies like solar photovoltaics (PV) have started to come down in price.

Yet, renewable resources cannot be correlated with load requirements, sometimes resulting in generation being insufficient or discarded if there is an abundance.

Meanwhile, thermal energy from fossil fuels is reliable and flexible but subject to price volatility and high carbon emissions. Mining companies are currently among the world’s largest CO₂ emitters, as most run energy-intensive operations supplied by power stations using either diesel or gas.

However, as investors seek to influence corporations to reduce their emissions in line with science-based targets and the Paris Agreement, this is becoming a less feasible way of doing business.

As a result, more operators are putting time, investment and significant commercial risk into seeking alternatives, like hybridisation. Very simply, this means combining more than one source of energy in a power supply system, typically the augmentation of renewable energy with thermal power generation. It becomes complex due to the variable nature of renewables and their increasing volume compared with a thermal plant.

To counter this, a hybrid system may incorporate a battery to smooth out the variability and employ a specialised control system – a microgrid controller – to manage the dispatch of each of the sources of energy, ensuring the power supply is reliable and the use of renewable energy is always maximised.

As James Koerting, Gold Fields Australia’s vice-president for energy and technology, explains, this improves the miner’s position in all three parts of the energy trilemma. “On the affordability front, the cost of dispatching renewable energy is cheaper than the marginal cost of thermal generation, particularly where diesel is the fuel,” he says.

“Increasing diversity in the electricity supply with alternative forms of power generation ensures security, and the mine becomes more sustainable where renewables displace fossil fuels and reduce the emissions intensity factor of the power supply.”

Security of supply is particularly important in the remotest mines, which can be exposed to supply risks when road access is restricted due to inclement weather. If a mining operation relies on diesel for both mining and power generation, and has one week’s supply of diesel fuel, a storm event that cuts off the roads for more than a week could be disastrous.

However, a hybrid system that generates a large proportion of electricity from renewables would reduce the mine’s diesel consumption, potentially allowing it to ride through the supply restriction without interrupting production.

The Agnew Hybrid Renewable Project has already exceeded expectations

Owned and operated by global energy producer EDL, the Agnew Hybrid Renewable Project at Gold Fields’ Agnew Mine in Western Australia is Gold Fields’ flagship renewables mine, and a case in point. Its A$113m ($85m) microgrid comprises a 4MW solar farm, 18MW wind and a 13MW/4MWh battery energy storage system, all of which is backed up by 18MW of gas generation.

It is managed by an advanced control system that optimises renewable energy penetration, with components interfacing and reacting swiftly to changes in load requirements – essentially eliminating unplanned outages.

The microgrid has already surpassed EDL’s target of supplying over half the mine’s power requirements with renewable energy. This can rise to up to 85% in favourable weather conditions.

“The Agnew Hybrid Renewable Project provides widespread applications for distributed energy across Australia for remote communities or mines,” says EDL CEO James Harman.

“A lot of these power stations in the past have been built on fossil fuel technology. We’re proving at Agnew that we can build new energy solutions with hybrid renewables that are more reliable than the grid, more sustainable than using fossil fuels, and at a competitive cost.”

Capable of powering the equivalent of up to 11,500 homes per year, the microgrid is expected to reduce Gold Fields’ carbon footprint by 45,000t carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂-e) per year.

Getting Agnew up and running was not an easy task

Harman is the first to acknowledge that Agnew has been an immensely challenging project to get up and running. Constructing the wind farm alone involved shipping 55 wind turbine components – including 15 blades measuring 70m each – from China to Geraldton Port and trucking the components over 600km to site.

The oversized blades had to be transported in convoys consisting of five vehicles, each requiring ten to 12 hours to travel to site. It took eight days in total to deliver all blades and equipment from port to site.

To then install the five 110m-high turbine towers, the supplier’s joint venture partner constructed concrete footings for each turbine base, each reinforced with 50t of steel and consisting of 500m³ of concrete, requiring about 85 truckloads of concrete per continuous pour.

A 1,600t crane, one of the largest operating in Australia, was transported in sections to site to lift and fit wind turbine segments on each footing. Five weeks of heavy lifting were required to erect all five turbines.

The project then experienced additional challenges caused by the bushfires in late 2019 and early 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic that struck in March 2020. The bushfires caused land transport routes to be closed off, delaying deliveries of critical equipment and forcing the project team to reprogramme their works and seek alternative supplies.

Meanwhile, as the wind and control systems were being commissioned, the travel restrictions and mandatory isolation requirements caused by the pandemic prevented key specialist personnel getting to site. The project team was forced to reschedule the wind commissioning and work with the control system supplier to commission the system remotely from Tasmania.

The transition to hybrid power may be a risk worth taking

There are also significant technical and commercial risks for miners to consider when making the decision to power their operations with a hybrid plant rather than a more traditional set-up.

“Hybridisation means adding variable generation to a system, which has the potential to affect the stability of the power network leading to supply interruptions and production outages,” explains Koerting. “To solve the stability issue, batteries must be costed in – but the batteries themselves do not generate any additional renewable energy. In fact, they consume some of it.”

In addition, the investment in capital intensive renewable generation, which is offset by a very low operating cost, changes the risk profile of financing the mining operation. This is particularly striking when there is a mismatch between the life of the mine and the term of amortisation of the renewable asset investment, which is typically 25 years.

“Smaller capped miners may not have the capacity in their balance sheet or have risk-averse investors that will limit their ability to make the shift unless they can guarantee the supporting revenue for the full 25 years,” says Koerting.

Even for a huge operator like Gold Fields, there was enormous risk involved to achieve what it has to date with renewable projects. With Agnew, some of this was overcome thanks to funding help from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which allowed investment in a larger battery to solve the technical risk without being a commercial hurdle.

However, the risk of the mine life being shorter than the asset life continues to be borne by Agnew.

“Agnew did opt to accelerate lease payment to shorten the amortisation of the assets to ten years – increasing unit cost for the first ten years then significantly reducing thereafter – and otherwise Agnew continues to invest heavily in brownfields exploration year-on-year to extend the life of the mine,” Koerting says.

For Gold Fields, there is no doubt that these are risks worth taking. Aside from Agnew, its hybrid power system at Granny Smith mine in Perth, which comprises 8MW on-site solar, 2MW battery power systems and a gas power plant, is fully operational, with around 10% of the energy supply sourced from renewables.

The company is also making good progress on its Gruyere location, with commissioning for its 12MW solar and 4.4MW battery plant scheduled for the end of 2021. At St Ives in Western Australia, a scoping study is underway to evaluate supply alternatives once the current power agreement lapses this year.

Hybrid projects in Chile and South Africa are also under development and the company has a long-term commitment of 20% renewables at all new projects, with most plants set to be managed by independent power producers that will recoup their capital investment via a long-term supply agreement with the mines.

In the meantime, Harman hopes the Agnew project will provide an example for other miners to follow. “Agnew’s success is great news for remote mines and communities targeting zero carbon emissions. All the big mining companies are committed to reducing their carbon footprint and many have zero-carbon ambitions,” he says.

“This type of clean energy technology, in providing an absolute key input into mining operations, is the game changer.”

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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It’s often said that we, as a species, know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the depths of our oceans. But for both mining experts and marine researchers this can be a frustrating generalisation, as there are parts of the deep-sea floor that we’re very well informed about.

Take the abyssal plains in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a geological submarine fracture zone of the Pacific Ocean. Lying unattached on the ocean floor are billions of tonnes of polymetallic nodules – potato-sized deposits containing rich concentrations of cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese – which were discovered in the 1870s.

Scientists have been studying them since the 1960s and we now have high-resolution bathymetric survey data covering hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of ocean floor.

The Metals Company (formerly known as DeepGreen Metals) plans to collect and produce metals from these nodules – the resource that it alone has so far managed to define – across two of its three separate licence areas.

According to the company, the nodules contain 1.6 billion tonnes worth of deposits; that’s enough to build at least 280 million 75KW electric vehicle batteries, a market that is growing exponentially as the planet drives, at speed, towards decarbonisation.

The metals found in polymetallic nodules are also key to manufacturing low-carbon technologies to generate clean energy, as well as the necessary infrastructure to transmit this power around the world.

A World Bank report in 2020 found that the production of minerals like cobalt could increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies. Over three billion tonnes of them will be needed to deploy the wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage, required for a future with no more than a 2°C temperature increase.

The quantity of these metals in circulation also needs to increase significantly to make the circular economy possible, given the lack of available material for recycling.

The Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron argues that collecting these deposits from the ocean floor is far less impactful than many existing mining practices on land. “In Indonesia, the number one nickel-producing country, there is between 20–30kg of biomass per square metre. Whereas the CCZ is the biggest desert on planet Earth; it just happens to be 4,000m underwater,” he says.

“If we had our time again and if we were to take a planetary perspective, we would carry out extractive industries in the parts of the planet where there is the least life, not the most life.”

However, deep-sea mining has been a contentious issue in recent years. Environmentalists argue we don’t have enough information to make that claim yet. In April, Greenpeace activists protested against The Metals Company’s current research study in the Pacific, holding banners reading ‘Stop Deep Sea Mining!’.

They said that the deep ocean is one of the planet’s least understood and least explored ecosystems, which is home to significant biodiversity and acts as a vital carbon sink.

Barron doesn’t entirely disagree. “I totally understand why environmentally-concerned people want to take a ‘wait a moment’ approach,” he says.

“I did the same. But the window for combatting climate change is very narrow, and we must look to the data and science to provide us with the answers as to where the lowest-impact sources of these metals are found.”

The Metals Company is committing more than $75m to its environmental impact study. “We have to understand the impacts and how we can mitigate [them],” Barron says. “It’s only then that you can compare it against the known impacts of land mining and answer the question: which one do we want? There is no perfect solution. You can’t say we want to stop relying on fossil fuels and move to greener technologies unless you face the fact that you need to build a lot of batteries. And to build the batteries, we will need mountains of these metals.”

Collecting polymetallic nodules without disturbing the environment

Another argument The Metals Company and others like it make is that the mining – or as they prefer to term it, collection – of these nodules can be done in a less invasive and more energy efficient way than traditional mining operations.

“Polymetallic nodules lie around like golf balls on a driving range,” Barron explains. “Using our harvesting system, we can collect them while only disturbing the top 5cm of  the sea floor.”

The system is a tracked vehicle that operates using the ‘Coanda effect’, directing a water jet in parallel with the sea floor to uplift the nodules, which will then be separated from most of the sediment at the sea floor. They’re then pumped up to the production vessel using a riser pipe.

The Metals Company says that around 92% of the sediment that is disturbed will remain at the bottom of the sea and the remaining portion, which enters the riser, will be returned later at an ecologically optimal depth. This is currently being determined by a group of independent scientists.

“We want to collect these nodules with the greatest efficiency and the lowest impact,” Barron says. “When you compare it with terrestrial mining – we’re able to lift the resource without touching it, a fundamental departure from what has gone on.”

By the end of this year, environmental studies permitting, The Metals Company plans to have a vessel in the Atlantic carrying out trials with the system. In mid-2022, trials are set to take place in the CCZ, and the environmental impacts observed.

It then hopes to launch its application to move from an exploration to a production licence in the middle of 2023, before beginning initial small-scale commercial production in 2024.

This also depends on whether the regulations have caught up with the industry by then. In international waters, deep-sea minerals like polymetallic nodules are governed by the International Seabed Authority, a UN body headquartered in Jamaica that is made up of 167 member states plus the EU.

Before the pandemic, the hope was that a set of technical and environmental standards known as the Mining Code – which has been in development for over two decades – would have been adopted in 2020.

While it has been delayed, Barron is confident the code will have been written into law by the time The Metals Company is ready to start production.

Autonomous robots may make the process less risky and energy-intensive

Benjamin ‘Pietro’ Filardo is another advocate of polymetallic nodule exploration, who believes the resource can be harvested with even less impact on the environment than The Metals Company plans to make.

His company, Pliant Energy Systems, is developing a robotic platform that uses slowly undulating fins instead of rapidly spinning propellers. “Rather than creating jets of fast-moving water for propulsion, our thruster moves large volumes of water slowly,” he explains.

When deployed in large swarms, the autonomous robots Pliant ultimately hopes to develop would work like bees, in comparison with the ‘giant shovel’ approach of the tracked crawlers many mining companies plan to use.

“We want to have minimal contact with the seabed – almost no contact if possible – and that can only be done with small swimming vehicles,” he says.

Another advantage of this approach, according to Filardo, is that it’s less risky than using just one large vehicle. “If one robot in the swarm fails, it really doesn’t matter; if one component in the crawler fails, the whole mining operation stops,” he says.

Pliant also proposes sending the nodules to the ocean’s surface in packets using buoyancy, which it anticipates would be less energy-intensive than a riser system. “Each packet of nodules will require a significant initial energy input, but once it has positive buoyancy, it’s an energy-free ride all the way up to the surface,” Filardo explains.

Nodule mining could be crucial, but its future is still uncertain

Pliant’s technology is at a much earlier stage than The Metals Company’s. It has a prototype robot and will begin rapid development of their next-generation system in the summer of 2021 with the aims of improving speed and efficiency, and developing autonomy.

But Filardo is realistic about just how much money will be required to get a system like this operating on a large scale. “Developing the AI for this swarm of mining robots won’t be a trivial task,” he says. “And only the prospect of a reward as great as a successful nodule mining operation is likely to fund such a sophisticated programme.”

To this end, he has set up the North Atlantic Consortium for Responsible Ocean Mining (NACROM) to raise awareness about, and potentially funding for, the systems he believes are required to achieve nodule mining with minimal environmental harm to the marine ecosystem.

However, he’s only too aware that it’s an industry that could get shut down before it even starts because of growing environmental opposition. “If the public puts enough pressure on the politicians, they may stop it from happening,” he says. “Politicians have other things to think about – Covid, pensions, taxes, unemployment.

Few have the bandwidth to delve deeply enough into this issue to come around to our way of thinking, which is that – if done right – nodule mining could be crucial to our planet’s future health, rather than a danger to it.”

Another challenge Pliant will face is convincing mining companies to adopt its technology. “They’re already too far down the road with the way they’re doing things,” Filardo acknowledges. “I think their perspective is they need to continue as they started until they’re mining and earning revenues. Then they’ll look more seriously at alternative methods.”

In the meantime, the ocean floor remains far more accessible than anything beyond the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, as Filardo stresses, it’s the ideal place to use advanced robotics technology, doing things people can’t easily do in places people can’t easily go.

“There may be ten thousand quadrillion [dollars’] worth of metals on Psyche, an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, but it’s out of reach,” he concludes. “Asteroid mining is still sci-fi. But mining nodules from the ocean depths with swarming robots? That’s a technological achievement within reach.”

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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Historically, mining has been at the heart of all human development, since the transition of cavemen from the Stone Age into the Bronze and Iron Ages. Our progress as a species has been measured in terms of the metals and fuel we dug from the ground powering us through industrial revolutions, wars and technological advancement.

And while much has been made of the destructive ability of the industry, less time is spent reflecting on its enormous potential to build and create. On 24 January 1848, a man named James W Marshall discovered gold in the water wheel of the eponymous lumber mill at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. Despite being sworn to secrecy by the mill’s owner, who feared for his plans to build an agricultural empire if word got out, Marshall had a loose tongue, and the news spread.

The California Gold Rush that sparked off from this moment ran from 1848–1855 and brought roughly 300,000 people to the area to take part in the hunt for the precious metal. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the US economy and the subsequent rapid population explosion allowed California to swiftly push for statehood, which it duly received in 1850.

The city of San Francisco owes much of its existence to this period of time. It had been a tiny settlement before the rush began, but swiftly boomed as merchants and new people arrived, causing the population to leap from 1,000 full-time residents in 1848 to 25,000 by 1850. It was, in a very real way, built on the back of the mining industry, and is just one example of creative potential of mining. The city would prosper and eventually go on to give the world the United Nations in 1945, the Summer of Love in 1967 and modern-day Silicon Valley.

Graphite, lithium and cobalt are the key to the US’s green energy plans

Silicon, however, is not one of the minerals that holds Rich Nolan’s attention. As the president and CEO of the National Mining Association (NMA), his focus is on graphite, lithium and cobalt – the metals that will help propel the US’s current green energy initiatives – and on helping the industry recover from the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The NMA is the national trade association for the US mining industry, representing coal, metal and industrial mineral producers, mineral processors, equipment manufacturers and other suppliers of goods and services to the domestic mining industry. It is the only national trade organisation that represents the interests of US mining before Congress, the presidential administration, federal agencies, the judiciary and the media.

A year and a half into the pandemic, the NMA’s top concern continues to be the safety of its workforce, “similar to every other essential industry that has continued to work to provide invaluable resources for our country throughout this crisis,” says Nolan. “Our members worked to adjust to the unprecedented challenge presented by the pandemic, following government guidelines with distancing measures, increased cleaning schedules, and limits on gatherings of groups, and our efforts have not stopped there.”

As the self-proclaimed “US mining industry’s voice and biggest advocate”, Nolan has played multiple roles in the NMA over the course of his more than 20 years of experience advocating on natural resources sector issues, previously serving for 13 years as senior vice-president of government as well as political affairs.

Nolan’s current role involves leading the NMA’s public policy efforts before Congress, regulatory agencies and the White House, and setting the strategic agenda for media relations, grassroots communications and political involvement.

It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that his career began on Capitol Hill, where he served as an aide to several members of Congress and worked as an advisor on multiple campaign committees. Currently, he is also a member of the Board of the US Energy Association and serves on the National Coal Council, a Federal Advisory Committee to the US Secretary of Energy.

The importance of investing in mining

In many ways, then, Nolan has served at the forefront of where the US mining industry meets national politics. He has been breathing DC politics for several decades, which gives him a unique insight into how the Biden administration’s future green energy plans are set to affect the sector.

Speculation has steadily grown over the upcoming American Jobs Plan that looks to tackle the US’s crumbling infrastructure, while also taking strides to tackle climate change, with reports estimating the planned spending to come in the region of $2trn.

This plan will reportedly cover everything from building electric vehicle charging stations and power lines that can deliver more renewable energy, to capping oil and gas wells to reduce emissions and reclaiming abandoned coal mines.

Funding will be provided towards the construction of about a million affordable, energy-efficient houses and to improve the energy efficiency of existing structures. Hundreds of billions of dollars will go towards high-growth industries with an eye on the future, such as advanced battery manufacturing.

“The Biden administration has been laser-focused on job creation, infrastructure, green energy and the electrification of our transportation sector – and mining is central to each,” Nolan points out.

The advanced technologies that are essential for the future that the Biden administration has laid out – especially where the green energy goals and support for EV production are concerned – all depend on the domestic mining industry.

The World Bank has estimated that the production of minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt could increase by nearly 500% by 2050 in order to meet the growing demand for advanced energy technologies. For Nolan, then, it’s pivotal that the US invests in the mining operations taking place on its own soil if the country hopes to have its demands met.

“For far too long, our minerals import reliance has been a silent, growing threat to the country. But the Covid-19 pandemic increased [US] awareness of the dangers of a heavily import-dependent and vulnerable supply chain,” he says, pointing out that the US’s import dependence for key mineral commodities has doubled over the past three decades.

“The US is now 100% import-reliant for 17 key minerals, and 50% or more import-reliant for an additional 29 key mineral commodities. All that is despite the fact that we have significant mineral deposits of some of these commodities within our own borders.”

However, Nolan believes that things are starting to move in the right direction. Given the executive orders that have already come out of the administration, its examination of supply chain vulnerabilities and other actions, he’s confident that the Biden administration understands the importance of the key issues facing the US mining industry.

More importantly, he believes they will actively work alongside US industries to better shield them from the extended, complex and fragile supply chains that have been so exposed by the global pandemic.

On coal, for example, the Biden administration has expressed support for the advancement of carbon capture projects, which Nolan sees as essential to addressing the world’s climate challenge.

“On the campaign trail, President Biden called for doubling down on carbon capture and we’ve seen similar enthusiasm from his administration,” he says, with a hint of satisfaction. “And the focus on infrastructure projects – which will require a substantial amount of steel – is significant for metallurgical coal producers.”

Indeed, consultancy CRU Group estimates that $1trn of spending could require an additional six million tonnes of steel, 110,000t of copper and 140,000t of aluminium annually. At the moment, the domestic mining industry is poorly placed to handle that kind of demand, which means that unless action is taken, significant amounts of these metals will have to be imported into the country at great cost.

US mining needs to boost its competitiveness on the world stage

“Our import reliance is alarming, having doubled over the past three decades. Why is that?” Nolan asks. “The key word for this industry is ‘competitiveness’. These are global commodities and we know for many of these metals, US miners are up against competitors that have full-throated government backing, and that don’t operate under the same environmental or labour standards.”

These competitors that Nolan speak of are a varied and diverse bunch, but the biggest by far is China. It may have been the first country hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was also the first to begin recovering from it.

So, while the rest of the world bunkered down in lockdown, China took full advantage of the plunging commodity prices in March and April 2020, importing 6.7 million tonnes of unwrought copper that year – a full 1.4 million tonnes more than its previous record.

These commodity purchases come as part of a broader series of investment by the Chinese state, which has been spending hugely on infrastructure for the past two decades. It is also the largest producer of rare earths, which are integral to just about all of the high-tech applications in development today.

It’s by far the biggest processor of the raw materials used to make lithium ion batteries – lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite – which will serve as the cornerstone in any green energy revolution. While just 23% of the world’s battery raw materials are mined in China, 80% of their intermediate processing takes place there.

In the face of Chinese dominance in this area, Nolan remains bullish, but stresses the need for the US to boost the competitiveness of its domestic mining industry on the global stage.

“We need action to improve mine permitting – the fact that it takes seven to ten years to permit a mine in the US, compared with just two to three in Canada and Australia, is nonsensical,” he says. “And, so, it would be counterproductive to roll back the much-needed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reforms implemented by the previous administration.”

Here, he is speaking about reforms finalised by the Council on Environmental Quality in July 2020, which was intended to update regulations that had first come into effect in 1969, and largely remained unchanged since 1978.

These changes, brought about by the Trump administration, were intended to help federal agencies expedite environmental reviews by placing a stricter limit on their duration.

Similarly, Nolan hopes to see action taken towards ensuring the mining industry has access to the US’s vast resources, rather than locking them away. Most importantly, and here he quotes the US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, saying that she “has warned in reference to our alarming reliance on China for too many critical products and materials, we can’t ‘bow to the altar of low cost’, and put security of supply, [US] workers and responsible development second”.

In order to meet the Biden administration’s green energy goals, then, Nolan and the NMA have worked hard to make it clear that “‘made in America’ must include ‘mined in America’”. That’s particularly relevant within the administration’s push to source some of the advanced energy technologies – such as EVs – from manufacturers in the US.

Building the responsible, advanced energy industrial base the administration’s current agenda envisions is dependent on the materials produced from US mines, by US miners.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there will be no green energy movement without the mining industry,” Nolan says by way of conclusion, before laying out the challenge that lies ahead. “The International Energy Agency is talking about lithium demand growing 40-fold by 2040, followed by graphite, cobalt and nickel where the number is around 20–25 times more.

“We will need to produce the same amount of copper in the next 25 years as humanity has produced in the past 5,000. As the CEO of a lithium producer recently said, demand is about to go ‘vertical’,” he adds, referring to statements made by Piedmont Lithium CEO Keith Phillips back in February 2021.

Looking ahead to MINExpo 2021

Nolan offers some words of encouragement for the industry ahead of the upcoming MINExpo 2021 event at the Las Vegas Convention Center in September, which is organised by the NMA and returns after taking a year off due to the pandemic.

“Our industry is used to operating in extremely difficult conditions, and we have a strong track record of innovating and developing new technologies to tackle seemingly insurmountable challenges,” he says.

“I think we will see more of that creativity dedicated to developing technologies that will continue to reduce the impacts of our projects on the environment, and I look forward to seeing some of those technologies on display on the floor of MINExpo.

“We are coming together in Las Vegas to celebrate what we have overcome to get there, and to kick off what I believe will be a decades-long mining renaissance ahead of us, where we expect to see an unprecedented increase in minerals demand.”

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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When they first arrived, back when Henry VIII ruled England and the Habsburgs ruled the world, Europeans were ruined by the Atacama. Expecting to find treasure – just like his predecessors against the Incas and Aztecs – Diego de Almagro instead nearly died there.

During the day, the conquistador and his soldiers shielded from 50°C temperatures by resting under the thin leaves of tamarugo trees. At night they walked, hoping to uncover El Dorado amid the sands. They were left disappointed.

When, in 1537, de Almagro and his men finally limped back to the Spanish colonial capital at Cusco, their clothes were supposedly so weatherbeaten that the explorers were referred to as ‘roto’ – torn. It’s a nickname Peruvians have used for their neighbours in Chile ever since.

How things have changed. Long a wasteland at the very tip of Chile, the Atacama now represents the centre of the country’s economy. The transformation can be summarised in a single word: lithium.

The desert, both in Chile and across the border in Bolivia and Argentina, contains 70% of the world’s supply. Without it our mobile phones, our laptops, our digital cameras and our Teslas would all be impossible.

Yet, if lithium is making Chile and its mining companies wildly wealthy – accounting for almost 10% of its GDP, nearly half of its exports and one-third of foreign direct investment – there is also a cost.

Native to the Atacama for centuries before de Almagro even knew Chile existed, the indigenous people of the desert have always relied on water to grow their crops and tend their livestock. But over recent decades, this precious resource has been disappearing – thanks in part to the very lithium that’s filled Chile’s coffers.

Along the way, it’s threatened ancient ways of life, dragged multinationals to court and even caused a lively constitutional debate. Not that the situation is hopeless: by investing in new technology and borrowing extraction methods from overseas, Chile could yet ensure its lithium industry works for everyone.

The impact of lithium extraction on the Atacama and its people

Fundamentally, Chile’s lithium problems can be understood geologically. The so-called white gold is typically found in saltwater brines, hidden under vast flats in the country’s far north. To access the lithium, mining companies first extract the brine with pumps, then direct it to large pools.

As the sun beats down on these pools over several months, the water evaporates. That leaves behind a mix of pure lithium and waste products – the latter removed via the magic of chemistry. Cheap and effective, this technique has helped the Atacama’s lithium industry explode. From just 20km² in 1997, the area being exploited has effectively quadrupled.

More to the point, says Dr David Whittle, a research fellow at Monash University, the industry is likely to become even more crucial. “Due to the rapidly increasing demand for lithium and its contribution to a low-carbon future, it is generally considered to have strategic importance,” Whittle explains.

All good news. Investigate the details, however, and difficulties soon appear. For one thing, that brine only contains 0.15% lithium – meaning mining companies have to extract vast amounts of water to make ends meet.

For another, 95% of the extracted water is lost to evaporation forever. In a region where it only rains about 15mm a year, and where some weather stations have never registered precipitation, it’s no wonder that many locals are profoundly uncomfortable about the industry’s success.

That’s doubly true, explains Dr Tim Werner, given the knock-on effects extraction can have on other water sources. “Surrounding communities will typically view these deposits as water resources,” says Werner, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne.

“When they are extracted, linked freshwater aquifers in surrounding areas are drawn down, making it more difficult for communities to access water for their own purposes.”

Nor is this just a hypothetical problem. Some Atacamans are already complaining about not being able to grow their staple peas and potatoes, or make money extracting salt, which also needs water. Even worse, there’s some evidence that Chile’s mining giants aren’t fulfilling their obligations to residents.

Though companies like Albemarle and SQM have invested in local communities, repairing schools and offering jobs, both have been accused of extracting more than their legal quota of salt water. Indeed, in 2019, a court upheld a complaint that SQM was over-extracting brine.

Certainly, the status quo is unsustainable. With one study calculating that 8,842L of brine is extracted from the Atacama’s dust every second – despite a ‘recharge capacity’ of just 6,810L – that’s quickly bound to leave a shortfall.

And though these numbers may sound precise, in practice it’s often hard to know exactly what impact lithium extraction is having on the Atacama and its people.

Jorge Cantallopts, director of research and public policy at the Chilean Copper Commission (Cochilco), says that “several hydrogeological parameters are currently used to measure the stability and brine use” but the problem is that much of the action happens on private land.

More to the point, mining companies are often shy about providing detailed statistics on their water consumption. Though academics like Tim Werner can use lithium production figures to take a stab at the numbers – bolstered by examining satellite photos of pond evaporation – he says that without detailed figures that’s always going to be a “guess at best”.

Change on the horizon for Chile’s lithium industry

The Chilean constitution has had a turbulent few decades. First introduced by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980, it was mostly designed to ensure a perennial right-wing majority in the country’s parliament.

During the referendum campaign to ratify the document, opponents of the regime were banned from television – while the official electoral roll was burned and 3,000 secret police agents supposedly voted more than once, according to the country’s La Nacion newspaper.

No wonder, then, that since democracy was restored in 1990, Chile’s politicians have taken to reforming their most sacred document with gusto. Over the intervening 31 years, it’s been amended nearly 20 times, with tweaks covering everything from personal data to the status of Easter Island out in the Pacific.

Over the span of Chilean politics, in other words, the newest changes are part of a long and established tradition. Yet when it comes to lithium, they could utterly transform the industry’s position – and future path.

At the moment, all that precious brine is classified as a mineral. Though the government technically owns the brine, it gives private companies like Albemarle and SQM a licence to control their own lithium operations.

If, however, the brine was reclassified as water under the new constitution, it would drag power away from miners – and give it to the indigenous people of the Atacama.

All this is shadowed, says Werner, by voluntary regulations. “Momentum has been growing for impartial certification schemes that can guarantee responsible mining activities to international standards.”

A good example, he notes, is the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), which now helps SQM prove it’s dealing fairly with local people.

Though constitutions and regulators can certainly improve things, it’d be better to attack the problem at source – and make lithium extraction cleaner. Fortunately, while politicians draft and mining executives fret, scientists are hard at work.

One of the most interesting initiatives involves the desalination of seawater. By using a metal-organic framework – imagine a type of complicated sponge – miners can extract lithium from the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Though the technology is both expensive and in the early stages of development, Cantallopts and his team at Cochilco are “strongly” in favour of it. That’s bolstered, adds Whittle, by other innovations, including extracting brine without evaporation. This could one day allow brine to be put back into the earth once the lithium is safely away – or even using solvents to secure lithium before it ever leaves the ground.

At the same time, the industry is looking at more straightforward ways of going green. An obvious option is recycling, something that’s already happening far from the shores of the Atacama.

In Europe, for instance, officials have proposed recycling targets for lithium-ion batteries. On the other side of the world, Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, recently suggested several ways to boost its own lithium recycling system. Among other things, this included better labelling and building more collection facilities. Similar initiatives are also being rolled out in the US, with a $175m lithium-ion battery hub set to be constructed in New York.

Certainly, none of these are bad ideas, yet experts warn that they can never hope to solve the industry’s broader problems alone. “In lithium-ion batteries, the amount of lithium is 2–3%, so there isn’t much cost advantage in recycling over direct mining,” warns Dr Mahdokht Shaibani, a colleague of Whittle’s at Monash University.

Even so, Shaibani adds that the number of end-of-life lithium batteries will “skyrocket” over the next decade – so governments, scientists and industry all need to work together to prepare decent recycling facilities.

Demand for lithium continues to grow

Where does all this leave Chile in the here and now? Whatever the human and environmental struggles, it’s hard to see the lithium boom slowing.

“We anticipate that we are going to keep rapidly expanding our lithium production industry and we also aim to develop a downstream industry with a focus on developing value-added products,” says Cantallopts. “We also have positive growth expectations for other countries in the region, especially Argentina, with several projects in hand.” Given the hunger for lithium in the global economy, that makes sense – not least in developing countries.

According to one recent study, China’s demand for the metal will triple by 2025. Across the Himalayas, India is proving just as vociferous, with the country expected to manufacture up to 40% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries by the middle of this decade.

Even so, the natives of the Atacama probably shouldn’t despair just yet. Prodded on by activists and legal action, after all, SQM has bolstered its membership of the IRMA with a number of other commitments.

For one thing, it’s promised to half brine extraction by 2030. For another, it’s investing billions of dollars in a lithium project in Australia. Rather than removing lithium from brine, this alternative method instead extracts it from spodumene, a type of mineral.

More to the point, Werner suggests that where SQM goes, other industry leaders will follow. “The behaviour of major producers in Chile, such as SQM, ought to help to raise the bar for all operators in South America.”

A fair point – for if Chile is finally cleaning up its act, it would be a tragedy for the desert landscapes of Bolivia and Argentina to remain roto in its stead.

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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The business of extracting oil and gas has, historically, been less vulnerable to market changes than most. In more secure economic times, the industry’s dominance of the energy mix is usually assured; in periods of recession, it is more likely to succumb to a time of gentle hibernation, with larger operators cutting back on platforms and drilling explorations like a gardener might to the branches of an unkempt hedge.

The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has pushed oil and gas into an existential crisis. As close to half the world’s population became subject to some form of lockdown, demand for energy across the board plummeted.

Gas pipelines were switched off and oil tankers were stranded in foreign ports, unable to offload their cargo. Faced with a massive drop in revenue, energy companies were forced to place countless future exploration and extraction projects on hold, or cancel them outright.

One might assume, then, that the eventual demise of the oil and gas industry might come sooner than expected. That seems altogether unlikely, at least if the efforts of some of the larger operators to embrace their counterparts in the renewables sector bear fruit. For several years now, companies like Total, BP and Equinor have been broadening their project portfolio to encompass numerous wind energy projects.

Whether oil and gas companies want to invest in this sector as a subsidiary to their main business as a way to use existing rig infrastructure for power generation, or to power the hydrocarbon extraction processes, there is undoubtedly a desire for the two sectors to form closer alliances.

“Offshore wind is becoming attractive,” says Søren Lassen, global head of offshore wind research at Wood Mackenzie. “We are seeing a transition across the entire value chain.”

It is demand, according to Lassen, that is driving supply. “The growth trajectory for offshore wind is very different to the oil and gas market,” he explains. “In terms of capital expenditure, offshore wind is rapidly growing, whereas in oil and gas it is decreasing.”

Although the returns are lower for now, growth in wind is more stable – an attractive prospect for fossil fuel giants beset with visions of their core business collapsing in the next couple of decades. “There is more certainty in the pipeline,” says Lassen. “And that is very attractive to oil and gas players.”

Why offshore wind operators are teaming up with oil and gas companies

Why is it so attractive, then, for wind operators to pair up with the likes of BP or Shell? It comes down to location. A combination of factors – from the world’s burgeoning demand for energy to the attitudes of local communities, to the placement of turbines onshore – has pushed offshore wind farms into deeper and deeper waters, where wind speeds are less volatile.

Oil and gas majors, for their part, can bring significant expertise and more when it comes to building in such locations.

“Capital is a very important part of it, but so too is the fact that the oil and gas industry is larger and has scaled up, so it has local connections in many markets around the world,” explains Lassen.

These older beasts of the energy world have lost none of their typical shrewdness in seizing opportunities when they present themselves. Lassen and his colleagues began to spot this in 2018, when the number of alliances between oil and gas majors, and their counterparts in the wind industry, spiked.

Seeing that the cost of investment was – at least to them – unusually low, many of these fossil fuel giants went on a spending spree. Spotting a stake in a wind farm was, says Lassen,“a relatively cheap play for an oil and gas company to position itself in a new market”.

Lassen singles out Equinor in this regard, which leads among its compatriots in the oil and gas sector when it comes to its investment in wind energy.

In early 2020, the Norwegian petroleum ministry approved Equinor’s plan to build a floating offshore wind farm in the North Sea to provide power to five oil and gas platforms.

The Hywind Tampen wind farm will be 140km off the coast of Norway and have 11 turbines generating 88MW. The company has been involved in the region since 2017, when it brought five 250m-high Hywind turbines to the offshore site.

Shell is another one of the big names aiming to build on its small but expanding presence in the wind industry. In late 2019, it bought the French floating wind company Eolfi.

“Eolfi has been a pioneer of floating wind development,” said Dorine Bosman, vice-president for offshore wind at Shell, at the time. “We believe the union of Eolfi’s expertise and portfolio with Shell’s resources and ability to scale-up will help make electricity a significant business for Shell.”

Such moves join the expertise, infrastructure and market knowledge of global energy companies to the dynamism of a wind industry fuelled, not only by growing demand and supranational goodwill, but also by a fanatical commitment to making renewable energy work.

The impetus and investment provided by oil and gas companies seeking to accelerate their energy transition will no doubt enable the offshore wind sector to forge new international industrial partnerships along the supply chain and further accelerate its growth. By that point, however, investment in turbines could become considerably more expensive.

“As the industry becomes more attractive, the market becomes more competitive for tenders,” remarks Lassen. “There is a trend towards joint ventures and partnerships because it is such a global industry now, and is rapidly becoming more so. So, it is challenging for offshore wind players to focus on just one particular market. As such, we are seeing more players forge alliances to tap into synergies and local know-how for key markets.

“The offshore wind players are usually large utilities, so they are hard to buy up, hence the alliances and organic growth,” Lassen adds. “Equinor – which has been in the market for a long time – and Shell are very different companies, and they are setting up alliances in very different ways.

“We are also seeing a lot of acquisitions on the supply chain side to create larger EPCI [engineering, procurement, construction and installation] players.”

Total is also pushing further into the renewables sector, with a stated intention of cultivating 25GW in wind energy capacity by 2025. The company is now a part of the Erebus offshore wind project as well, which will deliver a 100MW floating wind farm off the coast of Wales.

Elsewhere, Exxon is working with the Norwegian consultancy DNV GL to look into the use of offshore wind power to enhance the production of oil. The latter is proposing what it calls a ‘WINd-powered Water INjection’ (WIN WIN) project to provide a clean, reliable and cost-effective alternative for powering water injection in offshore locations.

Wind-powered water injection could be based on existing technology for off-grid, remotely-controlled operations, using an autonomous system moored in immediate proximity to the injection wells.

Partnerships need to be collaborative to prevent conflict

The advantages of partnerships between oil majors and offshore wind companies seem clear. Even so, Lassen urges companies on both sides to look beyond them and manage the potential difficulties that can arise when two such dynamic forces meet.

“There are some challenges, and we don’t have all of the answers yet,” says Lassen. “We have seen from some players in the supply chain that there is the potential to exaggerate the synergies between offshore wind, oil and gas, and neglect the differences – as offshore wind for the majority of its lifetime has been a niche.

“It is, therefore, important to have a balanced view where players are able to leverage the synergies while acknowledging the differences.

“They are two different industries, so transitioning from one industry to the other would also require investments,” he adds. “For companies looking to enter the offshore wind industry, it is important not to look at offshore wind as a niche but as a major growth industry, and invest accordingly to be competitive and capture future growth.”

One key factor to consider is that innovation has consistently proved to be a powerful force in the offshore wind industry. Partnerships must be able to adapt as systems evolve and projects scale up.

“The sector is very dynamic and the technology is changing,” Lassen remarks. “For instance, turbines are getting larger all the time. That has an impact on the whole supply chain. New facilities and new vessels are needed, so oil and gas companies coming into the market need to understand these dynamics when entering the market.”

We are seeing two competing industries converge and collaborate, so there will undoubtedly be a clash of culture in some areas. Nevertheless, the potential gains outweigh the pitfalls, so long as both sides share the same vision of the future.

This article first appeared in World Expro magazine, Vol. 2 2020.

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Soon after Pizarro laid waste to the Inca Empire, rumours began to circulate among the conquistadores of a city of gold, far richer than anything they had encountered before. Failing to find it in the jungles of Peru, they extended their search east, to what is now Guyana. An expedition into its interior of several hundred men was led by Don Pedro Malaver da Silva. The party was promptly massacred by the indigenous Carib tribes.

The testimony of its lone survivor – who, after begging for his life, claimed he was enslaved in the golden city for a decade before escaping – encouraged several more European expeditions to search for El Dorado, but to no avail.

Instead they found a semi-fertile land, bisected by the Demerara River, that was eminently suitable for growing tobacco and sugar. The first European plantations were established in the 17th century by the Dutch, who quickly began importing slaves from West Africa to reap what they had sown.

The basic destiny of Guyana as an extractive economy was set from this moment on. Change proceeded at a glacial pace. After the colony had passed from Dutch to French and then British hands, slavery was finally abolished in 1834, leading the local authorities to supplement the newly freed workforce with poorly paid indentured servants from India.

It is from these two groups that the demographic make-up of Guyana is now derived: the Indo-Guyanese, who make up 39.8% of the population; the Afro-Guyanese, at 29.3%; and the rest who identify as mixed race or as Indigenous Amerindian.

Relations between the Afro and Indo-Guyanese were rarely tranquil. Racial divisions were deepened and exploited by politicians on either side and irretrievably worsened by the British choice to back Forbes Burnham – the leader of the predominantly Afro-Guyanese People’s National Congress party (PNC) – as the country’s first post-independence prime minister in 1964.

Admired by the UK and the US for his anti-communist credentials, Burnham was also deeply corrupt and not above manipulating racial tensions for his own political advantage. By the end of his tenure and the first free and fair elections in 1992, Guyana had turned from a country with modest economic potential to one of the most impoverished in the world.

The political and economic stability achieved since then has been hard won. Guyana’s racial tensions have persisted – exemplified in the enduring rivalry between the PNC and the left-wing People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) – but in recent years have eased, with mixed gatherings of Afro and Indo-Guyanese not an uncommon sight on the streets of the country’s capital, Georgetown.

Then came the discovery – not of El Dorado, but something far more precious to Guyana’s future. In May 2015, ExxonMobil confirmed the existence of a vast set of oil deposits in the so-called Starbroek Block off the Guyana coastline, a recoverable resource potential that has since risen to the equivalent to eight billion barrels.

The announcement, and the subsequent flurry of activity in the country as the US operator gears up for extraction, left the country at an economic crossroads.

“The per-capita impact of this on Guyana would be dramatic,” explains David Goldwyn, chairman of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s Energy Advisory Board and an expert on Guyanese politics. “The challenge for a country like Guyana, given its state of underdevelopment, is how do you take this money and create the building blocks of development?”

The potential of new oil revenue will come with challenges for Guyana

Goldwyn is more qualified than most to answer this question. In addition to running the Atlantic Council’s energy advisory group, he served as the Obama administration’s first special envoy for international energy at the US State Department, where he helped start its Energy Governance Capacity Initiative (ECGI).

The scheme “looked at ten countries, which were not yet oil and gas producers, but might be, to try and see how we could improve their governance before they became producers”, explains Goldwyn.

Guyana was one of the countries dealt with by the ECGI. Altogether, the initiative helped provide seven years of US government support to the country, aiming to strengthen its finance and petroleum industries for the day if, or when, major drilling would commence.

At the time, it seemed only a slight possibility; while Guyana had oil fields in its shallower waters, they only led to a very modest return for the operators that bothered drilling.

The deepwater discoveries made in 2015 – analogous to similar finds off the coasts of Brazil and West Africa – have proved far more lucrative. By the end of 2021, if all goes to plan, these offshore fields are expected to yield some $300m for the Guyanese government, dwarfing any previous revenues it might have enjoyed from bauxite, rice and what little gold is mined in the interior.

“For a country the size of Guyana – 800,000 people – which was relatively poor, this is potentially transformational in terms of its economy,” says Goldwyn. “And so, for the last three years, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organisation of American States, every NGO that deals [with] oil sector transparency, the US government [and] the IMF, has been trying to advise Guyana on how to use these resources wisely.”

One of the main challenges will come in deciding what to spend the money on, and when. The legacy of the Burnham administration was one of under-investment in key infrastructure, immediately noticeable if one ventures outside Georgetown.

There, in the interior, “the road network, the water network [and] the electricity network is really not well developed at all”, says Goldwyn.

For Guyana to fulfil its true potential as a petro-state, he argues, it needs to make targeted and sustained investments from oil revenues in its education and transportation systems, as well as its electrical grid. All of this has to be managed carefully, an extremely difficult proposition for a governmental apparatus of such limited capacity.

The danger, says Goldwyn, is that ordinary Guyanese will expect much more of their elected leaders than they can immediately deliver.

While the initial potential returns of a couple of hundred million dollars will be significant, it will take a while before oil production is ramped up to the scale of $30bn in revenues per year – and for the effects to be felt by everyone in Guyana. “People’s expectations of how much their lives will change is immediate,” says Goldwyn. “This would be a challenge for any government.”

Preventing the ‘resource curse’ will require transparency and political stability

This challenge has a name: the so-called ‘resource curse’, shorthand for the corrosive effect massive new oil wealth can have on the integrity of a nation’s political institutions and social fabric.

Ultimately, the danger lies in government officials lining their pockets and preventing revenues from trickling down to the rest of the population. Time and again, new discoveries of the scale seen in Guyana have resulted in a marked increase in corruption, civil strife and authoritarianism, from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique to Papua New Guinea.

In early 2020, it seemed that Guyana was travelling down the same path. In March, a general election was held that was so poorly organised it took a full recount before it emerged that the incumbent PNC government had been ousted by the opposition PPP/C.

At first, however, President David Granger refused to leave office, disputing the election results through the courts. Eventually, international pressure – including a wave of US sanctions against individual members of the government – forced Granger to resign. Even so, it was an ominous portent for the kind of political strife Guyana might experience as its politicians fight to divide up the spoils of the oil discovery.

Ironically, Granger’s attempt to cling to power only served to delay the next stage in extraction. Aside from the predictable chill felt among international investors, the debacle also led to a delay in the predicted oil revenue schedule of up to nine months.

The PPP/C has also promised to review the terms of ExxonMobil’s proposal for its third extraction effort in the Starbroek block, after accusing the government during the election of granting terms that were suspiciously favourable to the oil major during its first project; terms that could have cost the nation up to $55bn in lost revenues.

Goldwyn, for one, finds this to be implausible, given that in first-round contracts, most of the risk is on the shoulders of the operator. “I think the contract for Guyana is reasonably standard,” he says.

Even so, the review process – led by a team of Canadian advisers – is one that Goldwyn deems entirely appropriate. Shining a light on how these types of drilling contracts are negotiated between oil majors and national governments boosts transparency, and strengthens political accountability as to how the resulting revenues are distributed.

“There’s a lot that countries can do to apply extractive industry transparency initiative principles, to make sure that all payments made to governments are published and verified,” says Goldwyn. That expectation, he says, “should do a lot to inform the public and the media as to what business is going on”.

And business is set to boom. According to ExxonMobil, the operator has already invested $67m in Guyana – which includes a direct workforce that is half Guyanese – 100,000 hours of training provided to Guyanese staff, $10m invested in an environmental non-profit and a local university, and created a purchasing network comprised of 600 Guyanese suppliers.

By the end of 2020, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Guyana’s GDP is set to balloon by 53%, making it the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Provided that the nation can continue to heal the divide between its Afro and Indo-Guyanese populations – a huge challenge, given Guyana’s history – its future looks bright.

The relatively low costs of extracting oil from its waters means that, in all likelihood, oil majors are likely to stay in the country over the next few decades, as the energy market accelerates its transition to renewables and the industry withdraws from higher-cost regions.

In that respect, Guyana is the final El Dorado for operators like ExxonMobil. “The resource is large, the unit cost is low and it will be up to the operators to ensure that it is also low-carbon, which is a matter of how they manage discretionary flaring,” says Goldwyn.

Needless to say, this all depends on a stable Guyanese body politic. “The future of Guyana really has yet to be written,” says Goldwyn. “We can only hope that both sides will see the political wisdom of taking the country’s interests first and using that money wisely.

“They’re up against a lot, but they have a lot of partners who are hoping to help them. You’ve seen this movie before. Let’s just hope that this version of it ends better than the previous one.”

This article first appeared in World Expro magazine, Vol. 2 2020.

The post How oil discovery in Guyana could reverse the country’s fortunes appeared first on NS Energy.

Moving offshore created new challenges for the oil industry. While wells had been drilled beneath the US coast since the end of the 19th century, they never ventured further than the rickety wooden piers of the day could reach.

Knowing the bonanza that awaited them, the oil companies moved their drills out to sea as quickly as technology could carry them: first on barges and, by the late 1940s, on rudimentary platforms.

These were rough-and-ready days, when operators struggled to adapt terrestrial extraction methods for life at sea; days when the industry moved fast and broke things, and people, too.

Dynamite was used to trigger the explosions necessary for determining if new reserves lay beneath the waves, a practice that led to anything from headaches among crew members who breathed in the fumes from the resulting ignition to fiery accidents that killed and maimed dozens of men at a time.

Incidents involving helicopters were commonplace too, less from pilot error and more from using a combination of swing ropes, cargo baskets and ladders to transfer crew from shore to rig.

By 1965, the accident rate in offshore oil had become so bad that Lloyds of London hiked its insurance fees for the sector. It was a very public signal that operators needed to adopt a set of industry-wide safety standards, not only for the handling of equipment, but also the daily engineering practices and build quality of offshore structures themselves.

Fast forward to the present, and these aspirations are now almost fully realised. ExxonMobil, for example, now spends an average of $100m on training each year, while 2019 saw staff and partners at Shell embark on a monumental 373,000 training days – or roughly 4.5 per employee.

Virtual reality simulation gives an extra edge when training offshore workers

One new technology could tighten safety practices even further. With virtual reality (VR) technologies already entrenched around the world, staff can now perfect their skills before ever setting foot on an offshore rig.

And with everything from augmented reality to gamification marching over the horizon, there’s every reason to think that the future is digital, and far safer than anyone who watched operations on those first offshore rigs could ever have imagined.

It almost goes without saying that training has always been vital to survival on offshore rigs. Apart from understanding the practical basics of life as an oilman – machinery types or power systems – students are expected to become medics, too.

Between CPR, first aid and marine survival, there’s plenty to cover. A course at the American Petroleum Institute (API) takes about 150 hours of serious study – and that’s before they join an energy company with its own specialised training. Browse the websites of industry heavyweights and one will be swamped by a storm tide of literature.

BP, for example, promises “a comprehensive approach to training its workers, combining rigorous standards, world-class instruction and sophisticated tools”. ConocoPhillips, meanwhile, aims to “attract, develop and retain employees through a combination of on-the-job learning, formal training and regular feedback and mentoring”, boasting over a dozen “talent development teams” to guide employees through useful courses.

Until about a decade ago, explains Kyle Daughtry, an XR solution architect at ExxonMobil, all this training was taught through a mixture of software and practical demonstrations. “Traditional methods include PowerPoint presentations, computer-based training and in-person training,” says Daughtry.

Over the past decade, though, energy companies have begun hunting for alternatives to ink-and-paper training books – something Jeff Potts, a cyber physical systems team leader at Baker Hughes, puts down to “the experiential aspect” of training.

“Being able to read about how to do a job in a manual, and seeing images, is one thing,” says Potts. “I think being able to actually simulate doing that job, using experiential technology, helps immensely in retention.”

Daughtry agrees, noting that VR systems are particularly good because they engage the user’s kinetic, visual and auditory senses – as well as encourage muscle memory.

It’s unsurprising, then, that big energy companies are so eager to invest in these experiential technologies, with VR training systems gaining traction across the industry. From 2015, BP began training offshore staff with VR simulation, educating them on everything from “cyberdrilling” to how to cope with emergencies.

Meanwhile, one project at Shell made a digital copy of a rig off the coast of Malaysia, letting the crew explore the decks in VR. Though the exact statistics are scarce, one report by ABI Research suggests that by 2022, VR wizardry in the energy industry will grow to $18bn.

Apart from sharpening training, this frantic investment can be understood from a financial perspective too. According to work by McKinsey, organisations in the oil and gas sector could reduce capital expenditures by up to 20% if they adopt digital technologies – a claim supported by Potts.

Because staff no longer have to fly out to physical sites to get hands-on training, he explains, companies can save vast amounts of money by using VR. “Once that adoption really accelerates,” he argues, “I think it will be a major cost and efficiency benefit as well.”

Offshore training programmes are beginning to embrace augmented reality simulation

If you’d asked an offshore worker about VR just ten years ago, they’d probably have laughed – the technology was just so basic. Resolutions were high, but the lag between detecting movement and the image changing often led to acute “cybersickness”, with even enthusiastic gamers swearing off the platform and its unwieldy headsets.

Since then, of course, VR has galloped into the mainstream. But it is still far from perfect. After all, cumbersome headsets are still around, as is a lack of immersion. As Potts explains, though VR does a good job at conjuring an alternate reality, it’s utterly removed from the space the user is actually in.

It hardly helps, he adds, that because users are strapped into pairs of personal goggles, collaborative training is basically impossible.

Yet the situation is far from hopeless, with several companies moving from VR to what’s known as augmented reality, or AR. Baker Hughes is at the forefront of these advances. Rather than enveloping users in a completely fake universe, its Phantom View platform blends digital features with the real world instead.

In the same way that Pokémon Go plops Pikachu and his friends on the street in front of the user, Phantom View can conjure valves, pipes and other machinery into the actual environment. Even better, continues Potts, Phantom View works everywhere from Microsoft HoloLenses to iPhones, making it perfect for collaborative training.

No wonder other companies are getting in on the act too – in the training realm and beyond. By exploiting AR helmets and other digital cleverness, for instance, Saudi Aramco has recorded a 70% increase in safety compliance, as well as a 10% improvement in workforce productivity.

Companies from BP to Chevron are going down a similar path, enticed by AR’s ability to offer digital documentation and step-by-step instructions to staff remotely, either on dry land or miles offshore.

At ExxonMobil, meanwhile, Daughtry and his team are using the technology to educate staff about a number of “low-probability, high-consequence tasks” that are hard to simulate using books and PowerPoints. That includes how to change out a hose or operate an offshore loading berth – both possible without actually having to go offshore.

Of course, any major technological shift comes with challenges – and the move to AR is no different. From managerial resistance to cybersecurity fears, a world where offshore staff are decked out with augmented technology is far from certain.

But speaking to clients in the field, Potts argues that, as younger professionals join the industry, the chorus of voices demanding AR and other digital technologies will only grow.

“It’s becoming more of an expectation,” he says. “I think what you’ll see over time is that as the generational shift happens, there’ll be more and more of an expectation of having these immersive technology solutions.”

More than a game

If Potts and Daughtry are right, and AR simulation really is the coming force in offshore training, where might the industry go next?

As in many other industries, one popular watchword is “gamification”. By turning training into a game, energy companies could make the whole process fun and get offshore staff ready if the worst happens.

By putting staff in a specific scenario, then giving them options on how to react, AR allows crews to test their readiness and judgement on the fly. For example, they might be faced with a digital fire – or, if they’re worried about another Deepwater Horizon, a digital gas leak – and be expected to fix it.

This clearly has uses for greenhorn staff, but experienced colleagues could soon be put through their paces too, with Daughtry noting that employees can be given new skills “at almost no extra cost”.

Obviously, even the best training on earth can’t entirely forestall the risk of accidents – recent spills from Russia to Canada suggest that even robust procedures cannot prevent every disaster. Still, it seems clear that as crews begin life offshore, AR will be their close companion.

This article first appeared in World Expro magazine, Vol. 2 2020.

The post How VR and AR simulation could define the future of training offshore workers appeared first on NS Energy.

Drones are no longer a flight of fancy. Rather, they are fast becoming part and parcel of everyday life. Most will have seen news footage shot with drones, watched one being flown by children in the park or even heard of their potential use in the delivery of online purchases.

Otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), these are becoming commonplace in many industries. And the energy sector is no exception.

In the oil and gas industry, there has been intense interest in the use of drone technology for operational assessments and surveys, especially for structures that make inspections by humans a challenging and potentially dangerous task.

For large structures in remote locations – where the environment is hazardous – drones potentially represent a great improvement in health and safety, which is why big operators such as Shell and Maersk Drilling have become early adopters of the technology.

“The use of drones is not only about safety, but also about accuracy,” explains Danny McMahon, metrology and digital team lead at the University of Strathclyde’s Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC), a specialist technology centre at the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS).

“The oil and gas industry is starting to use UAVs for visual inspection. But there are challenges from some environments, notably the North Sea, where you need a pretty heavy drone and where you have to be aware that conditions can change quickly.”

McMahon’s work at the AFRC has involved the reverse engineering of components using sophisticated 3D models, derived from full-field scanning methods. Scaling up to larger structures, this technique feeds into asset-modelling and inspection in a range of industries.

“There is a lot of interest in the technology for inspection and there are even some concept designs of welding drones that can operate in confined spaces,” says McMahon. Even so, he adds, “we are a long way off drones being used to perform that kind of task”.

While health and safety may be one of the main drivers of drone use for inspection, the technology also promises many more benefits. In an industry with highly-complex assets operating in many different environments across the globe, using UAVs present an opportunity to perform more detailed and reliable inspection at a much lower cost.

A drone, which can be piloted remotely, can perform the same visual inspection that might normally require a large team of personnel working in the field for an extended period of time.

Furthermore, the resolution of the images they provide may well provide more accurate information than a human working in a hazardous environment. This could be especially beneficial in an emergency, where situational awareness is of vital importance.

Drones are increasingly being used in offshore rig inspection

The past five years have seen a dramatic rise in the use of UAVs for inspection. In 2016, for instance, Condor Solutions flew the Microdrones md4-1000 system in Arctic conditions to inspect the Berkut Oil Rig in the Russian Far East.

Given the challenging weather conditions and the scale of the rig, this was a major challenge for the technology. Nevertheless, the UAV was able to deliver important thermal imaging data on the facility’s flare system in a relatively short time, while limiting the risks to personnel.

The following year, Texo Drone completed the first inspection of an offshore rig using drone-mounted lidar (light radar) technology.

Using its T28 Platform drone – a particularly large example of the form, more reminiscent of the Wright Flyer than a piece of hyper-modern technology – the company conducted a survey of the Paragon HZ1 rig in the North Sea. During a flight lasting barely more than half an hour, the drone collected more than 15 gigabytes (GB) of data about the structure.

Subsequent years have seen many more companies target the offshore energy market with UAVs designed specifically for asset inspection.

In 2018, Air Control Entech (ACE) and the Oil & Gas Technology Centre launched three next-generation drones that they believed could help the industry cut offshore oil and gas rig inspection costs by almost 50%.

The approach adopted by ACE differed from others in that it did not attempt to modify an existing design, but instead worked closely with industry partners to design new UAVs specifically for the needs of the offshore industry.

The result of which was a technology that provided a high-definition video stream and data transfer from offshore inspections to onshore teams in real time.

The drones, which use 3D laser-scanning with an accuracy of 2mm, have since been trialled by a number of major operators for deployment in the North Sea.

In 2019, mobile satellite communications company Inmarsat debuted its own innovation programme to investigate and enhance how commercial UAVs communicate with satellites. With partners Cobham and Starburst, Inmarsat teamed up with seven drone companies to, in its words, “integrate L-band connectivity and carry out trials with high-profile customers from the oil and gas industry”.

“The market for commercial UAVs is set for explosive growth and we expect satellites will play a critical role for UAVs operating in remote areas, where terrestrial networks are limited,” added Jordan Picard, digital incubation lead at Inmarsat.

More recently, Scout Drone Inspection and DNV GL worked together to develop an autonomous drone, which successfully inspected a 19.4-metre oil tank in June 2020, and Equinor completed its first ever UAV flight to an offshore installation in August 2020.

UAV technology is still improving

Over time, the capabilities of UAV technology have rapidly improved, so collaboration among industry partners throughout the value chain will be essential to keep pace with the potential of drone technology. A key step forward has been the move from remote control operations to autonomous or pre-programmed flight.

“In the past, small commercial UAS [unmanned aerial system] technology can be traced back to remote-controlled hobby aircraft, requiring significant skills to operate,” noted Chris Chung, head of strategic research projects at Lloyd’s Register, back in 2016.

“However, rapid advancements in hardware and software, including air stabilisation, pre-flight planning tools, obstacle detection and avoidance technology, have transformed these small aircraft into viable business tools that are likened to high-definition eyes in the sky.”

The next advance is already coming into focus. McMahon’s team at AFRC has been working on photogrammetry, which is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images.

“We began with a wind turbine, which previously required a human to abseil down to inspect it,” explains the engineer. “That not only raises safety issues, but also the human eye does not have the same resolution as the images we were able to create. Our scan uses a colour map, which clearly indicates any deviation from the models.

“Photogrammetry uses a camera to stitch together a 3D model but there is a challenge of scale – as the images are not 3D,” McMahon continues.

“We used a scanning technique on an end-of-life turbine, which we scanned and compared to our model. We were able to define the flight path to improve the resolution of the images and the orientation of the drone. We used autonomous flight because it is more accurate than flying the drone manually. The results were highly accurate, with tolerances of less than 1mm.”

McMahon is now looking at applications in the wind, nuclear and oil industry. The rig his team is using is simple and inexpensive. It uses 12 off-the-shelf cameras, which are fixed to a simple aluminium frame.

The rig is a quick and cheap way to get a highly-accurate 3D model of any component, and its low-cost means SMEs, as well as the large operators, can afford it.

“It is a very accessible technology,” he notes. “For now, photogrammetry is not much used or, indeed, widely understood. The industry is just dipping its toe in. Covid-19 could accelerate its adoption as it makes working in confined spaces, or even rigging up a person for visual inspection, much more difficult. It is hard to social distance in those circumstances.”

“It may seem counter-intuitive, but offshore rigs might be easier than wind turbines for photogrammetry. Rigs have many distinct features, whereas for a wind turbine, it is difficult to stitch together the images because the elements all look very similar.”

With the promise of reducing risk and cost, while providing more detail and higher-resolution images, drones may soon be the only sensible option for the inspection of offshore rigs.

This article first appeared in World Expro magazine, Vol. 2 2020.

The post The drone age: Making offshore rig inspection safer and more accurate appeared first on NS Energy.