Anglo American is continuing to respond to the incident at Grosvenor Mine, including through investing in the acceleration of technology to improve safety in underground mining.

CEO of Anglo American’s Metallurgical Coal business, Tyler Mitchelson, said: “Over the past six months, we have looked at every aspect of the management of risk in our underground mines, and commenced a range of work to accelerate technology solutions, particularly automation and remote operation.

“Removing people from potential harm offers the greatest opportunity to materially improve safety in underground coal mining.

“As the largest underground metallurgical coal miner in Australia, we will continue to leverage our scale to find new ways of addressing safety risks, drawing on international best practice and technology development.

“We have proactively responded to learnings from the Grosvenor incident and the Board of Inquiry and have a significant body of work underway**across our underground mines.

“We will give full consideration to the Board’s report and continue to ensure that relevant learnings are captured and actioned within our business, which will ensure our systems and process extend beyond current industry best-practice.

“Gas management is a significant and important part of our business. We have allocated $1.5 billion for gas management over five years across our underground mines, and will harness advancements in data analytics to optimise our approach.”

“We are committed to working with industry to ensure Queensland’s mining industry is safe, sustainable and productive and will continue to cooperate fully and transparently with the Board of Inquiry.”

**This work includes:

• Partnering with Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, to commence a world-first trial of technology to support automation in the roadway development phase of underground coal mining. We have fitted state-of-the-art navigation and CSIRO LiDAR technology to a continuous miner, to capture 3D scans of the underground environment and detect the marker bands within the coal seam. This is an early step towards automation of the roadway development process and an area that is of great interested to our industry.
• Commencing a pilot study at our Moranbah North Mine to assess the use of pressure sensors to remove power from the longwall face as an additional control if a significant overpressure event occurs. Whilst pressure sensors are already in use today across the industry they have not been integrated for this particular purpose. Initial laboratory testing has been successfully completed and pilot results will be shared with industry.
• Bolstering of our plans for remote operation in our underground mines. The purchase of new longwall equipment at Grosvenor Mine will include an assessment of the best available technology to further expedite our automation and technology journey.
• Establishing a new data analytics centre in our Brisbane office, which will bring together operational, engineering and data science experts to look at major challenges and opportunities for the future of our mines. Underground mining processes, including ventilation and gas management is our first priority.
• Continuing to improve our approach to critical controls through implementation of technology and data analysis to optimise the effectiveness of the controls.
• Allocating $1.5 billion for gas management over five years across our underground mines
• Announcing a review of the existing bonus structures at our sites with input from our workforce, to look at how we can focus on leading indicators, in line with Anglo American’s global Elimination of Fatalities program.
• While the Board acknowledged our already-robust Learning From Incidents (LFI) process (2.80), we are implementing an enhanced process to ensure relevant learning opportunities from all incidents are automatically distributed across our mine sites and are accessible to our workforce.
• To support an alignment of Queensland statutory reporting terminology, we have made the decision that any gas exceedance of more than 2.5% in our underground mines will be treated as a High Potential Incident in accordance with our global risk management processes. This has already been communicated to our workforce and was acknowledged by the Board of Inquiry (2.98).

**For more detail about the work Anglo American is undertaking, please view our briefing pack here.