Improve Equipment Reliability and Accelerate Time-to-Value with Out-of-the-Box Content for the Mining & Metals Industry

A quick online search for “Energy Transition” and “Mining & Metals” produces many articles and publications from reputed firms — all with a common underlying message: rising demand for raw materials to meet the growing needs for cleaner energy.

In a report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions”, the trends are a real eye-opener to what the future holds:

• Hitting net zero by 2050 requires six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.
• Electric cars typically need six times the mineral inputs of conventional cars  — while onshore wind plants need nine times more mineral resources than gas-fired plants. [see image]
• Lithium will grow the fastest —over 40 times in the Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) by 2040. It’s followed by graphite, cobalt, and nickel (20-25 times).

While the uptick in demand should create a positive outlook for the Mining & Metals (M&M) sector, in the current setup, organizations are plagued with challenges around multifactor productivity —capital, labor, energy, materials, and more. For example:

• M&M is highly capital-intensive and requires large investments for production.
• Labor costs and potential resource constraints vary by geographical regions.
• Energy requirements for mining production shouldn’t override global net-zero goals.
• Long lead times to meet demand — this could include lengthy timelines to obtain necessary environmental and indigenous heritage approvals, or lack of supply/availability of certain minerals (e.g., battery-grade nickel).

While it may be difficult to tackle market volatility and industry dynamics, productivity improvements can be achieved with better “equipment reliability” — a starting point for operational excellence and sustainable practices.

To maximize equipment reliability, organizations would require a digital transformation framework to assess the criticality of assets onsite, identify risks and mitigating actions, optimize maintenance activities, and ensure continuous improvement.

The solution? GE Vernova’s APM Strategy application, part of our holistic Asset Performance Management (APM) suite. Here’s why.

GE Vernova’s APM Strategy application is a collection of integrated tools, including:

• Asset Criticality Analysis (ACA)
• Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM)
• Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
• Asset Strategy Management (ASM)
• Asset Strategy Implementation (ASI)

Together, these tools facilitate the development of risk-based maintenance and monitoring asset strategies while helping improve reliability and maximize risk mitigation at the lowest cost.

For asset-intensive industries like M&M, it’s also imperative to identify and document known ways an equipment or system could fail — and then  establish a mitigating action plan or asset strategy. While methodologies such as RCM/FMEA are industry standards that can be utilized, the time taken to build content and templates for diverse asset types is time-consuming and resource-intensive.

To address this growing challenge, GE Vernova introduced Asset Strategy Accelerators (part of our overall Accelerators portfolio) which includes a library of 860+ maintenance templates detailing both risk and mitigating actions for several asset types — rotating, mechanical, electrical, safety, and controls. Users can now better prioritize maintenance efforts, reduce resource requirements for strategy development, and quicken time-to-value.

Organizations can unlock value with Accelerators as they help users to:

• save 1000s of development hours — learning, configuring, and connecting the right data to assets.
• experience faster ROI using GE’s extensive library – no need to build content from scratch.
• expand reliability to more assets across the plant and fleet.

To expand our content library and cater to the growing needs in the M&M sector, GE Vernova recently partnered with Assetivity, a boutique consulting and training company specializing in Asset Management, Maintenance, and Reliability improvement, with extensive experience in the global mining sector. This includes an addition of 30 new asset types broadly categorized into three areas: Mobile Plant, Fixed Plant, and Processing Plant [see image] 

“As one of the world’s leading maintenance and reliability consulting companies, we are proud to partner with GE Vernova to bring our mining experience and expertise to the APM product,” said Sandy Dunn, Assetivity’s Managing Director.”

In a surface mining operation, the digging units, usually electric shovels or hydraulic excavators, are a constraint for mine production. Higher levels of uptime generally mean higher levels of mine production, and in a capital-intensive industry such as mining, every tonne of additional production translates to outsized gains in profits. In addition, each digging unit typically feeds multiple haul trucks in an almost continuous process. Any interruptions, such as those caused by equipment failure, have a significant knock-on effect on haul truck utilization and the efficiency of the mining process as a whole. So, these digging units must have high levels of both availability and reliability.

When establishing the initial predictive and preventative maintenance programs for these assets, organizations often use the default programs provided by the equipment manufacturers. However, manufacturers aren’t always fully aware of the potential causes of failure of this equipment, the potential consequences of those failures, and the range of alternative maintenance strategies that can be employed to improve equipment reliability and availability. In addition, they tend to rely heavily on fixed interval replacement of components which is often more expensive and leads to lower equipment availability — while not necessarily improving equipment reliability.

When developing your own preventative maintenance program, it is advisable to use a proven database of strategies that are:

• Derived from a full Reliability Centred Maintenance/FMEA analysis.
• Incorporate the experience of a wide range of other mining organizations

… in addition to manufacturers’ recommendations.

The alternative — developing your preventive maintenance program from a blank sheet of paper using Reliability Centred Maintenance, or FMEA — is significantly more time-consuming, and the incremental gains make it hard to justify this investment in time and energy when you can use the outputs of others who have already done so.

Equipment reliability is a critical pillar in optimizing productivity in the M&M sector, with a single site noting about 35 to 50 percent of its annual spend for maintenance and repair. Having a software tool to manage asset strategies and a content library with risk and failure modes of multiple asset types is paramount in the current setup.