Perth-based mining technology company Qteq will use a $2.8 million federal grant to bring oil and gas technology into the mining industry.
Perth-based mining technology company Qteq will use a $2.8 million federal grant to bring oil and gas technology into the mining industry.
The boost to Qteq's research and development capability will enable it and its joint venture partners to further develop commercial products for the mining industry.
The three-year grant from the Cooperative Research Centres Program, which aims to improve the competitiveness, productivity and sustainability of Australian industries, promotes the use of high-technology equipment in the mining industry.
Qteq chief technology officer Tim Hopper said the company had been working to incorporate oil and gas technology into the mining sector in collaboration with Wallis Drilling and the University of Western Australia.
“This joint venture’s concept is to bring oil and gas technology into the mining space,” Dr Hopper told Business News.
“In particular the drilling aspect of it, which allows us to acquire geophysical measurements while drilling.
“Typically when you do minerals-based drilling in Australia it’s called reverse circulation (RC), which is completely different to the technique used in the oil and gas industry – mud rotary drilling.
“There’s never been development of geophysics sensors in RC drilling for minerals before.”
Dr Hopper said there were two components to the technology under development, the first being a real-time communications and downhole power generation system to be used with Qteq’s existing measurement-while-drilling instruments.
The second component will provide miners with the ability to acquire real-time assay and moisture content information during the RC drilling process.
It meant miners would no longer need to wait months for samples to be analysed before they could make decisions, he said.
When this technology was combined with an autonomous RC rig being developed by Wallis, the mining industry would have greater capacity for remotely monitoring and directing drilling operations, according to Dr Hopper.
“The products that we’re developing, we believe, could increase drilling efficiency rates somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent,” he said.
“That is obviously of interest because the miners can do everything faster and cheaper, but also because of the ability to get real-time information while drilling.
“In the past, a drilling rig would need four people to drill, plus a geologist.
“Between the technology we’re providing for use during the drilling process, and the automated rig by Wallis, the drilling can be done from an operations base in Perth, rather than onsite.”
Dr Hopper said the new funding would enable Qteq to develop its research on a larger scale.
“Australian companies are generally very innovative, you have a lot of great startups that do well, but getting to that next step is the hard part,” he said.
“So grants like this really help to allow companies like ours to take on the bigger stuff.”
Despite other research being carried out in Australia to transfer oil and gas technology to the mining arena, Dr Hopper said Qteq’s connection to industry provided an important advantage.
“I was an academic early in my career, but I moved into industry really quickly,” he said.
“With industry you can just get things done quicker.”
Dr Hopper said Qteq’s technology would be a cost shift for miners – the initial investment would be higher, but remote operations would decrease the monetary and lifestyle cost of fly-in, fly-out workers.
Once development was complete, he said, the joint venture would be able to commercialise the technology.
This would require significant additional investment from industry partners in order to achieve a global rollout.
But perhaps the greatest challenge would be industry uptake, Dr Hopper said, as the mining sector often found it challenging to adopt high-tech tools that could result in a substantial operational shift.
However, he is confident that the industry is prepared and willing to adopt the tools that Qteq can provide.
“A lot of our clients have already told us they want these tools, they see them as the future,” Dr Hopper said.
“So we are pretty optimistic that this new technology will be taken up pretty quickly, in which case it will be a significant change.”
