tough times ahead for wa

I for one would not want to be owning perth real estate when mine automation gets fully into stride. Of course what the idiot albanese doesn't realise is that plans like this would soon see RIOs iron ore assets nationalised or governments demanding a much bigger cut of rios profits. Your an idiot albanese.

Rio chief's vision of a mine without humans
By Helen Power in Western Australia
Last Updated: 11:43am GMT 18/01/2008



If you thought Rio Tinto's chief executive Tom Albanese has been doing nothing but fend off the unwanted attentions of BHP Billiton recently, you would be wrong.

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One of Rio Tinto's iron ore mines in Pilbara


Albanese's pet project - when he's not defending Rio against one of the world's biggest-ever takeover bids - is the "Mine of the Future."

Rio's American CEO has a vision. And it's a vision of industrial-scale iron ore mines in Western Australia's sweltering, fly-ridden Pilbara desert teeming with busy oversized diggers, trucks and railway carriages…….and no human beings.

In this world remote control "intelligent" drills will dig; driverless trucks will carry the ore to be processed and driverless trains will ferry it to a port to be shipped off to China.

Albanese was plotting fully automated space-age mines before BHP's November bid - and possibly from childhood - and hopes to have the first in place in the Pilbara by 2010.

advertisementBut he made a big step forward this week with the announcement of an alliance with Komatsu to develop some of the fabulous machines that will do this work.

And some of the other building blocks are already in place. Rio will shift some 300 of its mine-based staff out of the desert into a remote control centre, the "Pilbara ROC" - a prosaic office block the company took journalists to scope out earlier this week.

Some Rio staff are already there taking advantage of Perth's better climate - something that will allow the company to reduce the huge premiums it has been paying to persuade even the most hardened Aussies to work in the Pilbara.

But even when showing off his new toys, Albanese couldn't keep his mind off BHP.

Rio flew journalists out in a helicopter over the Pilbara to admire the company's transport infrastructure on Wednesday. But the chopper made a quick detour to "buzz the control tower" at rival BHP's Port Hedland, a site Rio believes is far inferior to its own ports.

BHP has until the 6th of February to decide quite how much it wants those ports, by which time it must comply with a Takeover Panel ruling to bid or walk away.