Webinar – Mipac and Ok Tedi at Austmine Collaboration Showcase

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you, Sheldon. We will be speaking about the co-design and co-delivery of Ok Tedi’s three-year automation and optimisation roadmap. My name is Dominic Stoll, I’m the Solutions Manager at Mipac and i’m joined by Lynda Brown, who is the Process Improvement Manager at Ok Tedi.

A little bit about Mipac: we’re 24 years young. We have a team of around 90 staff. We specialise in the automation and optimisation of complex processes, specifically within mining, minerals and metals, but also extending out into water, energy and oil and gas. While being headquartered in Brisbane, we have a global reach, with 50 of our revenue coming via partnerships with international clients such as Ok Tedi and our capability extends across the entire automation pyramid, delivering solutions from instrumentation all the way through to our proprietary augmented decision making and business intelligence software.

I’d like to hand over to Lynda now and just ask her to share a little bit about Ok Tedi.

Thank you, Dominic, and good afternoon everyone. I am very happy to be co-presenting our automation and optimization journey with mypack for the past three and a half years. For those who may be unfamiliar with Ok Tedi, just a little brief- it was originally owned, operated and managed by Bhp and in September of 2013, it was taken over by the state of Papua New Guinea. We are proudly 100 PNG owned. There’s an existing shareholding of the PNG government holding 67, and the balance of that is held by the local landowners and their companies. We are located on the cusp of the Indonesian and Papua New Guinea border and we pride ourselves on being the longest-running open pit mine in PNG. Our products are copper, gold and silver, with current head grades sitting at around 0.4 copper and just under 6.6 gold. We shift about 300 kilotons of dirt in the mine and we mill about 24 million tons per annum through our mills.

Thanks, Dominic, for the next slide.

That’s great, Lynda, and can you just share with the audience some of the challenges that Ok Tedi was facing when we embarked on this journey?

Sure so, as i said, three and a half years ago, Ok Tedi, the processing plant in Ok Tedi, was experiencing very low gold and copper recovery, and a lot of this was mainly due to unstable operations of the plant, and this was a dual problem. It was both to do with the reliability of plant equipment and as a result of that, you know, operators would actually run the plant in manual and, as you will all understand, different operators and variability of operation, and hence the board at the time approved and site commissioned a team to look into improving some of the processes. So, with all great things, there’s a funny story behind the automation and optimisation roadmap.

Can you just share with us the inception and how that really began?

Yes, so there’s a reason why there’s a serviette in the background of that slide, and that is exactly a serviette similar to that in which the strategy was arrived at by myself and Martin Randall, who was the Process Design Engineer with Mipac and who was seconded to us. So we developed a three-pronged approach to these problems. Obviously, we had issues with process stability, so instrumentation and control optimisation was key for us to be able to have some form of auto-control. The other part of this as well is that we had existing data repositories, such as the PI System, but it was not being utilised fully, so we had to actually upgrade and fix that system just so that we would be able to, as a minimum, show our short-term interval controls and be able to dashboard them publicly so that we could improve our decision making. The third part of that as well was  we – our teams – were just so busy fighting fires, with all the unstable operation, that we needed someone to step in and help us with developing our internal capability in terms of the process control system support, and that was done by Mipac, and there’s some fascinating case studies.

For some of the projects that we were able to deliver over those three years, can you just start with the hydrocyclones?

That’s correct. So up front in the circuit. We had to get that right from the beginning and, three and a half years ago, we would be experiencing frequent downtimes due to standing up of cycling feed lines, and that was again as a result of manual operation and equipment issues that, as a result of that, it resulted in us um actually doing a major exercise around calibrating and tuning surrounding instrumentation. We also introduced a number of control logics in terms of cascade control around water addition and auto control of cyclones utilizing pressure. In addition to that, we had to train up the control room operators to be able to handle these changes because they were so used to operating in manual for such a long time, and I’m happy to say that in this time, we no longer suffer any more bugging events as a result of these changes. Impressive outcome. We took a downstream approach to the improvement projects.

Can you just share a little bit about the next operation in the process: flotation.

So flotation. We had serious issues with our cell level controls, and this resulted in a lot of loss in recovery. So, apart from the metallurgical parameter manipulations, we introduced feed-forward control to replace the unreliable control system at the time, and this resulted in greater control of the levels, consistent throughout the overflow, mass flow and subsequently concentrate grade. One of the challenges that you described at the beginning was insufficient instrumentation and data for business intelligence.

Can you just describe how Mipac’s MPA augmented decision-making platform contributed to creating that visibility for the operations?

Absolutely so what we suffered at the time is that we had limited visibility and um transparency for the reasons as to why we underperformed. So we had to utilise a platform which would be able to create that visibility, and hence we partnered with Mipac and put a lot of our dashboard, a lot of our plant KPIs, on that online platform for the purposes of visibility, accountability, timely decision making and, you know, making data-driven decisions. As a result of that, we were able to hold people to account for their actions and also it increased performance as a result of that.

Fantastic. And so the partnership between Ok Tedi and Mipac was just one of several activities that Ok Tedi was performing, but a significant contributor to some very impressive success. Can you just take us through some of the outcomes that Ok Tedi has been able to achieve over the last few years?

Sure, Dominic, and I might add here that the automation part of it was only one aspect. There were actually other physical projects that we had to undertake. So of the initial strategies that we put in place, 67 of the actions have been the enablers for the current improvements that are reflected there on the slide, and this is a result of those three and a half years of work. Now you will notice that those two graphs, there are basically what we were mandated to improve: gold recovery and copper recovery. Now, for the purposes of this slide show, I have to qualify that we actually had this data validated by JKTech for the purposes of this presentation, and the results and the increases in recovery that you see there are actually independent of head grade, sulphur to copper ratio and concentrate grade, which are key for any improvements in recoveries. And I’m happy to say that the stable and automated operations actually leaves us time now to actually concentrate on improvements, and that has been enhanced by the digital maturity that we’ve arrived at.

Excellent, and so can you just share with the audience what your thoughts are on the contributors to achieving the success and working with Mipac?

Absolutely so, I guess, you know, I couldn’t help but overhear Patrick Tate earlier commenting in the earlier presentation about, you know, having customised solutions, and that’s exactly what Mipac did for us. So you know they listened to what we wanted and tailored the project within our boundaries and team capabilities, and we utilised their expertise in project management and the project management portal, confluence, to assist us in any way, any support that we needed, whether it was operational process or just project managing things. Now, this portal actually also enabled us to track the values of the different improvements that we were putting in place. It has also enabled us to be able to capture a lot of the changes that have been implemented and it captures the knowledge that goes with that and, as a result, if I leave tomorrow or somebody in my team leaves tomorrow, there is continuity for the next person coming in to be able to continue the improvements on what we’ve built up.

Yeah, that’s great, Lynda, and I think it’s worthwhile acknowledging that a lot of this activity was undertaken during Covid, where it just wasn’t possible for people to travel to Ok Tedi, and while our typical approach is a hybrid one of site and remote work, we essentially shifted to fully remote delivery and still managed to achieve the success that we did. So it’s a testament to how effective that portal is, absolutely so.

I see there’s a question online and hopefully we can answer it before the Q and A session. But Lynda, can you just tell us about what is next, from a visionary as to what Ok Tedi is going to be doing?

So, if you refer back to our automation roadmap, on under serviette, you’re actually 70 of the way through our journey and we have now reached a level of maturity, which enables us to improve our decision-making and, as you can see, we’re now analysing control loop metrics and monitoring. Those are things that were unheard of back in the day. In addition to this, we’ve also established what we call a COE, or centre of excellence, which is now starting to accept improvement ideas to augment these current results. The next cab of the rank is basically our plant asset renewal project, which is a 248 U.S. million dollar worth project which is looking at actually replacing our whole entire copper floatation plant and we’re looking to include the latest technology to further improve our operations and we’re really looking forward to working with octet on that and your other partners, so with such significant success. It’s not just one person, it’s as a result of a team.

Lynda, is there anyone that you’d like to acknowledge?

Well, all the faces are up there on the screen, but I guess, first and foremost, we’ve got to acknowledge our general manager, who is a sponsor, Greg Moore, and who believed in us to be able to carry out this work and support us financially. Obviously we have our process improvements champions and in the likes of Samson, Damian and Graham Elliot, and obviously we have a process technical advisor in  Dominique Waligiri, and including Tony Porter, who was our abb composer, who did a lot of our control logics, along with Mipac. We couldn’t have done a lot of the work without them and a lot of these, you know, to be able to have these sort of recoveries that we experienced. It was a site-wide collaborative effort and that was going through the process.

Technical services teams are reliability teams, maintenance operations and asset management, and, from a Mipac perspective, I’d love to acknowledge Martin Randall, who Lynda mentioned was one of the Mipac originators. He’s since handed that baton over to Mick Milovanov and Raven Pathery and, of course, Glen Johnson, who has been the project manager throughout the entire journey.

That brings us to the end of the presentation. Everyone, thank you so much for the opportunity to share this journey with you. On behalf of Lynda, Ok Tedi, Mipac and myself.