Remote analysis: the near future of mining

por Uwe König, Thursday, 30th January 2025

Mining remote area in Spain

As easily accessible mining deposits run low and ore grades diminish, the mining industry has two courses of action available: to increase efficiency at brownfield sites dramatically, or to explore greenfield sites not yet mined. The best option, of course, is to do both – and that is what we see happening in the industry today.

Exploring new frontiers

Mining companies are beginning to look at locations known to contain mineral deposits that have been ‘put off’ until now due to their remoteness or difficulty of access. Sites that would have been considered an unjustifiable expense a few decades ago are now the next logical step, whether in the Australian desert, under the Greenland ice, or deep underwater. But despite advances in technology, these sites remain difficult (and expensive) to access.

As a mining company, it can be understandably hard to find highly skilled employees who are willing to make the move to these locations, and recruitment is only half the battle. Once you have a team, you have to train them, insure them, fly them back and forth, and keep them supplied with necessities for as long as they are needed. It’s expensive – and time-consuming.

In today’s regulatory landscape, you also need to ensure that you are mining as sustainably as possible. A larger headcount makes this more difficult day-to-day, but the good news is that designing a new mine from the ground up to run with fewer employees is much easier than reducing the numbers at a current site.

Connecting the dots


On-line, real-time materials analysis is already revolutionizing process control from the mine and stockpile to the furnace, thanks to next-generation analyzers like the CNA cross-belt family.

Alone, these individual instruments are already a powerful lever to increase efficiency and drive sustainability. But when combined within a holistic, customized system of automated processes, they can work in harmony to create a fully automated laboratory that reduces costs and eliminates human error.

Automated laboratories can take care of every step, from sample preparation and transport to analysis and results reporting, with only a small core team necessary to resolve issues and maintain the system. Samples can be moved around via pneumatic tube for longer distances, with robots to prepare samples through dilution, fusion, grinding, or any other method needed before placing them into sample holders. With experiments repeated exactly every time results are significantly more consistent, and throughput is many times higher than in manual labs.

Mining in the cloud


Thanks to remote services, such as Malvern Panalytical’s Smart Manager system, instruments in an automated lab can be closely monitored so that any performance issues are diagnosed immediately – often much more quickly and accurately than in traditional setups, thanks to precise information and automatic reporting.

And that’s not all: another key industry trend that builds on the automated lab is data analysis in the cloud. Once results from various instruments and sensors are reported into one centralized platform, there is no need to have your expert staff on-site to analyze the data.

Remote access to data stored in the cloud opens up your analytical process to anywhere in the world, and software automation is an easy addition to refine data analysis further where human input is not needed.

From this point, it’s not such a large step to using this rich data for predictive purposes – not only reacting to samples of ore already mined, but also using real-time sensor information to direct automated mining operations based on AI and machine learning. This promises to save energy, waste, and much more.

Tomorrow’s remote future


As mining companies around the world turn to more remote locations and work toward sustainability, process efficiencies that can be added into existing workflows will not be enough to offset both the carbon and the financial costs involved. New mines must be ‘automation-first’, with a holistic design that maximizes productivity and minimizes costs.

This will be challenging, but it also represents a great opportunity. Necessity is ‘the mother of invention’, and the industry has an unmissable chance to design its own future by thinking carefully today about how it wants to work tomorrow.

Malvern Panalytical can help you solve the challenges of mining in remote locations. Explore how our automated solutions and remote monitoring can help you reimagine your processes today here.

Further reads