Mining sector lowering emissions by leveraging data

Technology solution for open-pit mine sites MaxMine will use the Snowflake Data Cloud platform to manage its more than 25 Terabytes of operational data.

High-quality data and near real-time analysis are imperative for MaxMine clients, helping mining supervisors and operators — including those in remote locations — improve equipment lifespan, optimise their operations, make informed decisions faster and deliver operational changes in their sites.

By leveraging the Snowflake Data Cloud, MaxMine continues to build out its core product analytics capability, creating large critical data sets in running complex and large-scale queries on regular schedules. The Snowflake Data Cloud will equip the company’s customer-facing business intelligence and product development teams to decouple their workloads to maximise value to customers.

As the world heads towards 2050 net zero goals, the mining industry is under pressure to increase production. To help build cleaner energy solutions such as solar, wind and water, the mining industry will need to mine six times more metals than today, according to the International Energy Agency. At the same time, the industry faces new sustainability requirements.

Tom Cawley, Executive Chair and Interim CEO, MaxMine, said the average open pit mine can reduce Scope 1 emissions by up to 10–15% by leveraging data.

“MaxMine employs data enabling the average open pit mine to improve productivity whilst also reducing its carbon footprint by around 15–20,000 tonnes of CO₂,” he said.

“At the same time, MaxMine’s safety solutions use data to determine incident causes and opportunities to improve truck operator behaviour. Huge amounts of data are vital to our mission to get ‘Mining Done Different’, so we needed a partner of Snowflake’s calibre. With Snowflake, we are able to derive greater value and deliver tangible benefits to our customers, supporting them and accelerating their decarbonisation journey.”

Ben Chartier, Head of Product Development, MaxMine, said Snowflake was chosen after an extensive and in-depth review of modern cloud data technologies balanced up the technical and business needs for the MaxMine product.

“We were impressed with Snowflake’s approach to decoupling compute and storage from the underlying data technology. With Snowflake, we were able to get a technical proof of concept up and running in a week, and so were able to demonstrate a meaningful capability uplift with a short time to value,” Chartier said.

“Working with the Snowflake team is just as good as the Snowflake technology. The technical and account teams are always available and willing to lend a hand to help us overcome specific problems as they arise.”

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