Rio Tinto opens Processing Excellence Centre

Rio Tinto has opened its global Processing Excellence Centre (PEC), located in Brisbane. The state-of-the-art facility enhances monitoring and operational performance by examining, in real-time, processing data from seven Rio Tinto operations spread across the globe.

The PEC was initially commissioned as a pilot project to identify and implement process improvements across the company’s managed copper operations around the world, including Rio Tinto Kennecott (USA) and Oyu Tolgoi (Mongolia). The initiative was rolled out to five Australian sites from Rio Tinto’s energy product group at the start of this year.

The PEC is a co-location of experts who process and analyse real-time operational data from remote sites to improve mine performance, reduce costs and increase recovery. The experts can then issue operational advice to their colleagues on the mine sites about how to maximise productivity and improve performance.

Rio Tinto has been working with JKTech, Schneider Electric, Metso Cisa, iGATE and The University of Queensland through the Rio Tinto Centre for Advanced Mineral Sorting to develop the centre. Schneider Electric has partnered with the company to deliver services and solutions for the centre, supporting analytics and delivering regulatory control on instrumentation and data management for the seven mine sites.

“At a time when mining operations are under more and more pressure, using specialised skills, services and technologies to optimise operating budgets can deliver considerable gains,” said Diego Areces, President, Mining, Minerals and Metals Segment, Schneider Electric.

“Being embedded into the PEC has given us great understanding of Rio Tinto’s business objectives, allowing us to add real value. With this understanding, we have been able to leverage our vast knowledge of the mining industry with respect to automation, and our ability to deliver our solutions on a global scale, to help Rio Tinto duplicate this initiative, and potentially reap the same benefits across multiple operating divisions and in numerous locations around the world.”

“The PEC is really pushing the boundaries of technology in terms of communication architectures, virtual environments and remote connections,” said Phil Barrett, Schneider Electric’s Global Account Director for Rio Tinto. “As a result, it has become a truly collaborative environment that centralises many varied and complementary skills, leveraging the vast experience and expertise of its people, to work as one team delivering significant savings to Rio Tinto.”

“This groundbreaking facility allows us to focus on optimising a specific part of the value chain across unlimited sites anywhere in the world,” said Rio Tinto Head of Innovation John McGagh. “We’ve been able to assemble a world-class team to work with live data and deliver improvements in mineral processing.”