In this episode

When was the last time you stopped to think about all of the components that make up every single product you use each day? From the device you’re reading an email on to your favourite kitchen appliance, mining touches every aspect of your life. In this episode, we connect the importance of the products of mining to our modern lives in order to reframe attitudes towards mining. 

Guests: 
Brett Gilley, Geology Professor, University of British Columbia 
Greg Brouwer, SVP, Technology and Innovation, Teck
Jillian Lennartz, Manager Sustainability Reporting, Teck (Jill from Teck)

Transcript

00:00:01

Clip 1: Is this all that you have to remind you of the fun of last...

00:00:04

Robin Stickley: Remember the days of six channels to choose from on the TV dial and a TV guide in the newspaper to make sure you didn't miss Three's Company? From the days of a single screen in the house, here's my 2022 version. I'm scrolling through 48 options of true crime documentaries on TV, at the same time, flipping between my social media accounts on my phone, envying my friends. They all seem to be out there on boats. That has me wondering, "Hey Siri, what's the weather going to be like this weekend?" My laptop of course is never far away. I've got a few emails I've got to send to my producer by the end of the day, but... oh, well, work's going to have to wait. There's my niece FaceTiming me from her dance recital. Got to take that call.

We have so much technology at our fingertips now we've become screen multitaskers. Our relationship to our devices is lifelong, committed, for better or for worse. Screens have become a permanent fixture in our hands and in our homes. While you're binging the latest season of the new buzzy show on one device and buying the hottest new gadget on another, you're probably not thinking about what those devices are made of. The hyper- connected world we rely on is built on metal. Consider this, the data centers that house the servers that make the internet run are built with steel. So are a lot of the other things you use every day. Just go into any room in your house. You will find mind elements in everything from your toaster to your toothpaste, and especially that smartphone that's glued to your hand. We can't deny how much mining has changed our lives for the better, but how much do we understand how our love for the modern world has made the demand for resources that much more pressing?

In our premier episode of Why We Mine, I'll talk to Professor Brett Gilley, also known as the Geo Dude, about how the natural world supports our everyday lives, and Greg Brouwer, Teck Senior Vice President, Technology and Innovation, about how mining companies are evolving to ensure the industry meets the technological demands of the present and the future. I'm Robin Stickley. This is Why We Mine.

Before I talk to the experts on mining metals and how they're used in our daily lives, I wanted to sit down with someone who can put everything into perspective for us. Through my work on this podcast, I've met Jillian Lennartz, the manager of sustainability reporting for Teck, and a self- proclaimed scientist with social skills. Right, Jill, great to see you. We need to put that on a T- shirt, by the way. That just sums up your enthusiasm for these topics. It really is infectious. So what can you tell me about the connection between mining and technology?

00:03:12

Jillian Lennartz: All right. So do you remember the periodic table poster that was in almost every science classroom?

00:03:19

Robin Stickley: I do remember it. Don't have it memorized, but I remember it.

00:03:21

Jillian Lennartz: Yeah. If you picture that table in your mind, that big route of boxes, like some sort of monster Tetris block, you remember how each of those boxes was a single element?

00:03:30

Robin Stickley: I do. I'm having a flashback to my chem teacher, Mr. Zadnaski, teaching us ‘Au, give back my gold’, and it worked. I remembered it.

00:03:40

Jillian Lennartz: Oh gosh, that's such a dad joke. Au, for our listeners, is the symbol for gold, and that's just one of the 118 elements on the periodic table. In fact, only 80 elements are completely stable, meaning not radioactive at all. So of those 80 stable elements that I mentioned, at least 70 are in the phone that you just showed me, according to the American Chemical Society.

00:04:04

Robin Stickley: Oh wow. So it's like nearly the whole periodic table in that phone.

00:04:08

Jillian Lennartz: Yeah. And all those elements are in places you might not expect, like indium, which many people have never heard of, is in touch screens because it makes the glass super clear, it helps conduct electricity. There's copper, gold and silver in the wiring, lithium and cobalt in the battery.

00:04:23

Robin Stickley: Interesting that you're mentioning copper wiring because there's copper wiring in bigger things too, like houses and buildings, data centers, even.

00:04:30

Jillian Lennartz: That is true. I used to work for a software company, spent time in the data centers, they're just giant rooms of aluminum or steel racks filled with servers and switches and routers, and of course all of the wiring to power and connect them.

00:04:43

Robin Stickley: Will the Cloud help to reduce the need for data centers like that, do you think?

00:04:47

Jillian Lennartz: The Cloud is just someone else's data center. You're still using a physical technology thing, you're just accessing it remotely. So it seems like it's a wireless thing that exists in a virtual world. The more we use data and technology services, the more computing power and those data centers we're going to be needing.

00:05:04

Robin Stickley: So brings us back to what you're really saying here is that the Cloud is actually made of metal.

00:05:10

Jillian Lennartz: Exactly.

00:05:11

Robin Stickley: That's awesome. Thanks so much, Jill.

Let's hear my talk with Professor Brett Gilley from the University of British Columbia about how our modern world is having an impact on the resources needed to power it. Brett Gilley, welcome to the very first episode of Why We Mine. We are so thrilled to have you here with us. Great to see you.

00:05:35

Brett Gilley: Thank you very much.

00:05:36

Robin Stickley: Brett, let me start by saying if Geo Dude is your unofficial title in this life, and I really hope that that is on your business card, I feel like you've made a lot of really good decisions to get there. Talk to me about your background in geology.

00:05:53

Brett Gilley: So I mean I've been obviously interested in geology since I was young, like many people, but I was lucky enough at university to start doing physical geography and then eventually doing degrees in earth sciences. And as they say, if you stay at university long enough sometimes they start paying you.

00:06:13

Robin Stickley: Brett, I want to know more about where the nickname Geo Dude comes from because I mean... first of all, super cool nickname, but most of the time people don't give themselves nicknames, so what's the story behind this one?

00:06:27

Brett Gilley:Yeah, a colleague of mine in one of the other departments wanted me to do an outreach video and I guess he got creative when he put in the nicknames. I got it from one colleague and he uses it sometimes. It's pretty fun.

00:06:39

Robin Stickley: That's fantastic. I've watched a lot of your work online and you have a following on YouTube. It's so cool how... I was going to say just that you're super relatable as you teach and you make geology fun and interesting. How did that come about?

00:06:53

Brett Gilley: I mean, teaching is a skill you work on for a very long time. At some point in my travels between degrees, I realized that teaching was something that I wanted to do and I've just sort of worked to try to get it better. The key thing for me there is usually thinking about what motivates the students, because what motivates an expert is going to be very different than what motivates a student, and so trying to look at it through their perspective usually helps me a little bit.

00:07:16

Robin Stickley: Yeah, you're making it not only fun but also understandable for folks like me who are certainly not experts in the field, but I've really enjoyed watching them. I think I'm coming back in my next life as a geologist, perhaps.

00:07:28

Brett Gilley: It is fun. It's very useful. We sometimes tell students in the classes that we're making it so no one will ever want to go on a long drive with them.

00:07:36

Robin Stickley: Well, I love that I am having this opportunity today to talk to you because what I want to start with is... let's call it a little bit of metals 101. What is it, Brett, about metals like copper and zinc that makes them so valuable and so unique?

00:07:51

Brett Gilley: Depending on what metal you're talking about, I mean they all have amazing properties obviously, and I'm not a metallurgy expert, but gold we've used for a long time because it's rare but it's also easy to work. Copper's relatively easy to draw into a wire. It's quite ductile and so it's useful when we use a lot of electricity, obviously. It works like that, and the chemical properties of all of these we use in different ways as well. Zinc can be used for anti- rust and things like that. There's a whole variety obviously of all the things we do, but when we look at our world, if it's something that we can't grow, then it is something that we have to mine.

00:08:26

Robin Stickley: When you are standing in front of a group of students, say you're at the very beginning of the school year, how do you make that connection that you were just talking about, about understanding, using responsibly and how much we rely on mining, how do you make the connection between the products of mining, like copper, like zinc, and the world around them?

00:08:46

Brett Gilley: We do a variety of different things. Sometimes we might talk about how the cost of the metal relates to how abundant it is or we might talk about, for an intro class for example, we might say, " Let's look around the room, what things come from minerals?" We're quite disconnected from our supply chains in society and so even just stopping and having that thought, it's actually kind of difficult to think about a question like that or what things even are minerals.

 And so you can point a lot to electronics we have around, but even things like concrete in the walls of a building, for example, is something that you're going to be an aggregate in sand that you're going to be mining to build that. Cities in many ways are built of sand and rocks. So all of those things, trying to make people think a little bit more about where the stuff comes from and hopefully be a little more responsible at how we use it. And so even thinking about how we build buildings and what we build buildings out of is one of the things that we need to struggle with as a society.

00:09:42

Robin Stickley: You've got an anecdote I think that also speaks to some of what we're talking about, about someone who makes a toaster from scratch, which does not sound like a simple undertaking. Can you talk to us about that?

00:09:53

Brett Gilley: Yeah. I thought it was a fascinating story. It was years ago, I'm not sure, maybe even five or 10 years ago, but someone spent two and a half years of their life making a toaster, which people think of a toaster as a fairly simple machine, but to go through and actually mine and refine the metals yourself, and I think he tried to actually get to a wellhead to get the oil for the plastic, because if I recall, he actually just had to accept petroleum from someone because he wasn't allowed to get to the wellhead, but he sat through and built this huge thing and made a mold out of wood.

And so it looked like a child's drawing of a toaster and then he plugged it into the wall and all of the electronics immediately melted in like 15 seconds or something. But the idea that showing that you could do it was kind of interesting, but the idea that something like that is so hard. When we think about the availability of consumer goods, as a society, we're very good at producing things. What we can achieve with everybody is the reason why people are disconnected from our supply chains. It's not possible to have all that information in one person's head.

00:10:55

Robin Stickley: Yeah, when it comes to copper gets into my iPhone, I mean there's no chance I could explain how that works. What are some of the things that you do, Brett, with your students to drive that point home?

00:11:06

Brett Gilley: The idea of the supply chain is something that does come up sometimes and obviously it's something everyone's been talking about in recent years. Part of the difficulty of it is, if you think about something like a piece of electronics, there's so many different components in it and it's so complicated that tracing any one element, even, in it is almost impossible. Our friend with the toaster could not do that in two years for sure.

00:11:28

Robin Stickley: Do you feel a sense of hope when you're in front of a classroom of students?

00:11:34

Brett Gilley: I do. I think students are a lot more savvy than I was certainly in my first year. They seem to know a lot more and they're interested in the world and how things work and so I generally feel very hopeful. It is one of the reasons that I do teach because it's trite to say that they'll solve the problems that we've caused, but I think it's true in a lot of ways that if we're going to succeed as a society, it's the new younger's ideas that are going to be bringing it forward. So being able to help guide that process I find very helpful.

00:12:00

Robin Stickley: Brett, thanks for being with us.

00:12:01

Brett Gilley: Great. My pleasure.

00:12:07

Robin Stickley: Stay tuned for the next part of this episode where I speak with Greg Brouwer, Teck Senior Vice President of Technology and Innovation, about innovations like the use of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and much more to help bring sustainability to the world of mining. I'm Robin Stickley. This is Why We Mine.

Welcome back to Why We Mine. I'm Robin Stickley. Let's hear my conversation with Greg Brouwer, Senior Vice President of Technology and Innovation, about how mining companies are evolving to ensure the industry meets the technological demands of the present and the future. Greg Brouwer, welcome to Why We Mine. We're delighted to have you with us today.

00:12:58

Greg Brouwer: Greetings. Good morning. How are you doing, Robin?

00:13:00

Robin Stickley: Hi, I'm great, Greg. Good to meet with you. If there was a subtitle on our conversation today, I think it would be something like, "Not Your Grandparents' Mine." Something like that because so much has changed in mining and I'm really curious about this. So that's kind of the big picture. Let's maybe start a little bit smaller picture, Greg, and you could talk to me a little bit about how recently this shift has really come into play.

00:13:25

Greg Brouwer: Well, I think the thing to remember is that mining is one of the oldest industries on the planet. We've been mining for tens of thousands of years and the way we mine today is very different than the way we mined many, many years ago. So we have continually and consistently been shifting, but more recently the shift that we've been seeing more so is embracing digital. What we have seen across the globe and across other industries is that there's been a lot of changes, a lot of evolution in the digital space, and as a mining industry, I would say that we were perhaps a little bit slow to recognize just how much value we could leverage from digital broadly. When I say digital, I mean AI and other technologies. And so from a tech perspective, we really started to ramp up our thinking around digital about four or five years ago, and it was at that time we started questioning where we could use digital, where we could leverage digital to drive value, and that was really the origin of what we call today our RACE program.

RACE is our digital transformation program here at Teck. It stands for Renew, Automate, Connect, and Empower. We've started back in 2019 with a bold goal to drive significant value in our company through digital technologies, and we made pretty significant investments over a three- year period culminating in the end of that initial program, the end of 2021, when we were able to announce to the markets that we had delivered on the outcomes that we thought digital could drive within a mining company. So a lot has changed for us in the last two years, and it's not just Teck. If you look across our industry, increasingly mining companies are doing exactly what we have done, really asking where they can drive new value and impact through digital. But I think that when you look at where Teck is positioned globally, I think we're probably pretty close to the front of the pack now in terms of how broadly we have embraced technology and innovation in digital the last few years.

00:15:20

Robin Stickley: When you say four to five years ago, to me, Greg, that's not that long ago. Was there a reluctance to embrace, or why is this kind of such a recent phenomenon?

00:15:31

Greg Brouwer: Yeah, I think a couple of reasons. As an industry, we tend to not be first movers when it comes to new technologies sort of developing globally. We're a fairly capitally intensive industry. There's a little bit of conservatism in our culture, and so a lot of the impacts that we're seeing from digital and digital transformation, it's not as though they were happening 20 years ago. I mean, that's a relatively recent phenomenon as well, maybe a few years before we sort of recognized that opportunity, but for whatever the reason, the most important thing is that we absolutely have recognized the value of digital today, and it is a very clear focus for us as an organization going forward and really for the industry broadly.

00:16:13

Robin Stickley: Is there a specific example you can think of, Greg? I'm sorry to put you on the spot totally here, but something specifically that we weren't doing even five or 10 years ago that's different today, like something you could paint a picture for our listeners?

00:16:25

Greg Brouwer: Sure. Well, I think the best example is how we've embraced AI, or artificial intelligence, and specifically a technique under that banner that we've leveraged extensively is a technique called machine learning. Some of us have heard the term machine learning and big data when we sort of pick up Wired magazine and read about what's happening in the technology space. Honestly, those were terms that even me personally five years ago I had read about, but really had no sense of what they meant or how that could be applied to a mining environment.

If you look at where we are today as a company, we are streaming in real time enormous amounts of data to the Cloud. This has just started in the last few years, and we do that because we can leverage techniques like machine learning and deep learning to analyze these vast amounts of data using very high powered computers in the Cloud, and in applying those techniques, we can develop insights and understandings as to what is happening across our business. These systems can then in turn give us recommendations and advice of what we could or should do differently to run more optimally across our entire supply chain. And so this notion of AI, which is a concept that lots of people have heard of and probably didn't really appreciate how that could be leveraged in our industry, is absolutely taking over right now, and certainly taking over in our company.

00:17:46

Robin Stickley: If we asked 50 people on the street or in the grocery store, if they would put the words mining and sustainability into the same sentence, I'm not sure how many people would necessarily agree with that, or maybe they don't know enough about it to understand, but do those two words go together in your world, Greg?

00:18:04

Greg Brouwer: Well, the short answer is in my world, they absolutely go together. You point out though a problem that I think we have as an industry. We do have a reputational issue. Unfortunately, and in some cases, there is a basis for that. There has been some unfortunate incidents that have happened over the years that really loom large I think in people's minds, and despite the fact that we have an industry of incredibly passionate people when it comes to sustainability and we're continually focused on driving improvements and becoming ultimately more sustainable, these perceptions can be hard to change. I've actually, in conversations with (inaudible)  here, the organization, talk about how even for me personally when I meet with family and friends at times they will say things and I'm like, "Well, that's not actually right. It's not true." And so there's a lot of misunderstandings, perception issues around our industry.

And so when we're bringing people into our organization, lots of new employees had some of these perspectives and when they join us, they're like, " I had no idea that there was as much commitment and passion around sustainability as there is." So I think that there is more to do, but certainly one of the best things that I think is happening right now is that as these younger generations are joining our industry, they're bringing an even heightened passion around sustainability versus some of the generations before. When you grow up in our society today, you cannot help but be very exposed to some of these global challenges that we're basing, and people are bringing those perspectives in and they're really helping us leap forward in even a greater pace than we have in the past.

00:19:36

Robin Stickley: It really is a fascinating relationship. We rely on mining to a great extent, the extent to which I don't think we even totally realize day to day, and yet we don't have a lot of understanding for really how it works.

00:19:47

Greg Brouwer: Yes. And there's no better example of that than the situation that we're finding ourselves in right now. Sustainability is a really important topic in society, and so we're seeing increasing pressures on ESG across society broadly and on our industry.

00:20:02

Robin Stickley: I've heard that acronym before. It stands for environment social governance.

00:20:07

Greg Brouwer: And that's having a pretty significant impact on our industry today in two ways. It's doing something actually quite peculiar. It is decreasing supply for our metals that we produce, while simultaneously increasing demand. And what I mean by that is as we start to raise expectations around minimizing impacts, that makes it more challenging for us to operate. And there's some situations where we're not going to bring mines online in the future like we would've in the past, or we're going to do things differently. So there's some supply constraints that are happening.

On the flip side, and decarbonization is a great example, we all recognize globally the critical importance of decarbonizing across our society broadly. Well, the thing that a lot of people don't understand is that in order to decarbonize, that is going to rely heavily on electrification. And guess what? You can't electrify without significantly increasing the metal production that comes out of our industry. You need the metals for the batteries, you need the metals for the transmission, you need the metals for the green power generation. So we're in this unique situation where the demand from society for the materials that we produce is going up while at the same time the supply of our metals, there's pressure on it going down as we continue to, rightfully so, raise the bar on sustainability. So the future for our industry is looking very good. It's a very core and critical industry to support a green transition.

00:21:30

Robin Stickley: I like that. That's interesting. Let's pivot into the people implication a bit now, Greg, because we're talking about all these new technologies, AI, what's the impact here to jobs? Does AI change the playing field in such a way that it puts certain jobs out of reach for certain people? Is there a possibility to retrain employees? Talk to me about that.

00:21:52

Greg Brouwer: Sure. I like to keep going back to our example that mining a hundred years ago is very different than mining today, even before digital started to really take hold. And so if you looked at the jobs and the sorts of work people did in the mine a hundred years ago, very different than the sorts of roles that you would see people doing in a modern day mine. And so this notion of changes in terms of what our employees need to do, the contribution they make to support our outcomes has and will continue to evolve. When it comes to the digital specifically though, you make a good point that digital, and then under the umbrella of technology and innovation broadly, is going to be driving shifts in our employees. We are requiring more employees with digital skills and technological skills than we did in the past. And as an industry we have always been committed to training and helping our current employees develop the skills they need so that ultimately they can take on different roles in our organization.

00:22:49

Robin Stickley: Fascinating. As we kind of wrap up a little bit here, Greg, let me take you back to that family dinner or that work function where you're meeting people and you feel like you have to defend a little bit the position, your workplace and what Teck is doing, how does that feel? Is that something that is easier now than it was? I know you've been with Teck for some time.

00:23:10

Greg Brouwer:  For a long time now, I've felt that it's an easy conversation for me to have. I understand the commitment that our company has towards sustainability and driving positive outcomes in the world. The thing that I think needs to happen is that as an industry, there probably needs to be a little bit more coordination of how we tell the accurate story of what's happening. I mean, for me personally, it's one conversation at a time, but I think as an industry there needs to be ever increasing focus on how we can educate more broadly and share that message more broadly about the criticality of what we do as an industry to our future as a global society, criticality of our industry to supporting decarbonization and sustainability more broadly.

00:23:50

Robin Stickley: Let's crystal ball a little bit into the future here. What is ahead from mining in terms of so much change has happened, are you staying at that pace now in terms of more change into the future, more technology? I mean, as you said through the conversation, that demands certainly aren't going away.

00:24:06

Greg Brouwer: Yeah, I mean crystal balling is always a little bit more difficult. There's a couple things I would say. I think that we are on a trajectory that we will be seeing more autonomy over time in our industry. I think our mines in 20 years from now are going to look very different than they do today, even where we're starting to embrace some of those technologies today. That's one thing that's changing. The other thing is that at its core, a digital transformation, which is what our RACE program is, is a people transformation. And over the last few years, yes, we have developed great software, we've leveraged AI broadly, et cetera, but we also have educated broadly our employees, our managers, people that run our mines, et cetera, about what these technologies are and what they can do.

00:24:49

Robin Stickley: Greg, thank you so much. What a pleasure to listen to your insight and get a glimpse into this ongoing evolution in the world of mining. Thanks so much for being with us.

00:24:58

Greg Brouwer: Thanks very much, Robin. Take care.

00:25:08

Robin Stickley: After listening to our guests in this first episode, I'm struck by the space in between how dependent we are on the products of mining and how little we know about the industry. Why is that? I wonder if it's that we don't see mining. It feels like a behind the scenes world that isn't quite tangible to me. I could explain the basics of how produce gets to a grocery store, but I don't have the same confidence about what mining looks like, or even how it's done. And maybe the ideas I have are outdated. That space in between is a great place to be standing as we begin this journey and these conversations. It tells me there's a lot to ask and a lot to learn. I'm Robin Stickley. This is Why We Mine.

Next episode, we're driving into the world of electric vehicles, from the hottest new EVs on the road to long wait lists for your custom electric car, how is the built world as well as the world of mining responding to this moment? Can we keep up with the demand or is it a moment where we'll play catch up forever? Let's get into that, and much more.

Why We Mine is brought to you by Teck. Our producer is Andrew Pemberton-Fowler. Our sound engineer is Diego Domine, and our production assistant is Hugh Perkic. Additional production support provided by JAR Audio.

Resources

Technology at Teck 

Teck’s Technology Transformation Programs Enhance Performance, Safety and Sustainability; Expected to Generate $1.1 billion in Annualized Benefits