Cybersecurity keeps BHP's technical officer awake at night

After all, this is a company that is preparing for the safer, smarter, more automated and less manual mine.It is considering approaches for which the technology does not even exist.However, it is cybersecurity that keeps Tyler awake at night.She admitted to Australia's Mining Monthly at the World Mining Congress that she waits in fear for the call to come that BHP's systems have been breached by a bad actor.So far that call has not come, although there have been a couple of near misses."You never know what you don't know," Tyler said."We need to make sure our people or systems are safe and operating well." Tyler said BHP's firewalls and systems were tested regularly, before giving some quick pointers on how individuals could look after their own cybersecurity, with antivirus software being the starting point."We have to stay a pace ahead of the bad actors," she said."It has to be in the skillset if we are going to stay in business."Digital destinyThe need for cybersecurity will only grow as BHP's business becomes increasingly digitalised and its use of citizen developers grows.Tyler said a key question in the digitalisation push was how to mobilise the data BHP collected and turn it into solutions and outcomes."We've had our data strategy underway for the past two years," she said."How do we have clear data owners? We have to understand accountability. We have to touch the data as little as possible."Once you have good clean data you can apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to it."As part of this effort BHP has created digital factories. These are small teams of software engineers and data analysts who work with BHP's miners to apply their data to solving their problems.One of these factories came up with the Product Variability program, which has been put into practise at BHP's Western Australian Iron Ore operation."That has given us $35-$50 million in extra value," Tyler said.The technology applies a grade adjustment model that uses data sources to capture real-time movements of ore across the supply chain to map the ore coming from the mine. An application called Stacks On is applied to maintain a three-dimensional model of material in the stockyard.That system can easily be moved to other areas in BHP's portfolio, such as coal.Data dreamingTyler, who started out as a geologist, as her own data dream.She wants to tag each rock with its geology and metallurgy and then track it through the process from the orebody right to the customer.One of the challenges miners face as they go deeper into their data is that while their trucks have a couple hundred sensors on them all reporting information, not one of them can tell what the truck is carrying in its tray.Tyler admitted that was a problem, although she pointed to Plotlogic's face-scanning technology as one of the solutions BHP applies to get around the problem.That technology takes infrared images that show where the ore and waste are in the face."We've started to apply quality control and quality assurance to the material as it come out of the mine and onto the conveyor," Tyler said."It almost learns from itself."Tyler also wonders whether there is a reason to go down to the point of tagging every rock."We're still quite chunky with our geological blocks," she said."We have blocks of 10m by 10m or 5m by 5m on the orebody."We have sensors on the loader that knows what it is working in."But is their value to go down from that?"I don't think we're too far away from bucket-level decision-making."By that she means deciding on the fly whether the material in the excavator bucket needs to be sent to waste or to the plant.Cleaner miningElectrification of mining equipment is another area Tyler is looking at closely.She said the haul truck automation journey BHP had gone down would play a crucial role in this.That haulage automation has led to significant productivity improvements for BHP's bulk commodities operations in iron ore and coal. It also helped reduce emissions by making the diesel-fuelled equipment work more efficiently.One part of this automation package uses artificial intelligence to make calls on when it is the optimal time to send a truck to refuel.As the haulage fleet becomes electrified this will become increasingly important. The system will be able to determine when it is best to send each truck off to recharge while maximising throughput.BHP is already looking at electric haul trucks."We have one battery-electric truck running around in Arizona with Caterpillar," Tyler said."We're not very far away from starting to run pilots."Tyler said BHP was also considering trolley assistance, recharging station distribution and dynamic charging as part of future mine designs.The seekersHowever, before mine design even begins, the orebody has to be found."Over the past couple of years BHP has reorganised its exploration team to seek out new deposits located across four global regions," Tyler said."We recognise that the old ways in which we approached exploration will not serve us as well in a new, deeper, undercover type of world."We have leveraged the systems thinking of the petroleum industry and seek to understand the dynamic system required to emplace a new ore deposit. We aim to look at the earth in a different way."I have to acknowledge the many BHP Petroleum colleagues who worked with the mineral geologists to develop and mature a minerals system model using the extensive BHP datasets."They have built a new way of thinking of the accumulations and concentrations of metals in given regions to inform our exploration search spaces."Tyler said BHP also partnered with those who brought fresh eyes and a different way of thinking to the process, citing AI-ML partnerships such as those with DeepIQ/SRK and Kobold."And as we home in on our new targets we recognise the importance of new ways of using and collecting data," she said."BHP Innovation, the Resource Centre of Excellence and Olympic Dam geologists and geometallurgists have applied the first sparse three-dimensional Hardrock Seismic Survey across the Olympic Dam deposit with very interesting results."This work is an adaptation of modern-day hard-rock seismic methodologies - again borrowed from the petroleum industry - and successfully applied across an ore deposit."This will accelerate resource characterisation and the targeting of drill holes - ultimately reducing cost and time to production."And so what is old, or known in one industry, is being refashioned, accelerated and innovated to deliver new and exciting results today."Tyler said mining was moving to a less hands-on world."We increasingly need more people with digital skills right through our sector from the innovators to the front lines of production and maintenance," she said."We need to bring workers with us on that journey. We simply don't have enough of them."The good news is that today's generations of primary and secondary students are picking up digital skills as they learn coding, etcetera at school. The base language of digital analysis is being engrained earlier."However, as other speakers at the congress pointed out, the challenge lies in getting these primary and secondary students and their understanding of the base language of digital analysis to want to come to mining.The citizen developerOne way is, perhaps, BHP's embrace of the "citizen developer" concept."At BHP we enable people to register as a citizen developer to work on BHP problems," Tyler said."They are fully onboarded, supported with access to resources like security groups and environment access, and provided with education and training."There are more than 300 registered citizen developers at BHP, working individually and in collaborative communities."The outcomes are exciting. For example, an app that improves on a complex escalation process for safety and environment events within our integrated remote operating centre has been a game changer for that team."The app was built by a processing specialist with no coding experience. He just saw a process that could be improved and set about doing it."The industry needs more citizen developers. We need to train them now and we need to make sure they see the mining industry as stable, attractive - dare I say exciting and future-facing."

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