By: Richard Roberts - Editorial Director, Beacon Events

IMARC 2024 drew the world’s major mining companies, a host of political and trade delegations, and most of the industry’s leading innovators to Sydney, Australia, for a memorable conference and exhibition. Mining Beacon editor Richard Roberts attended more than 40 sessions across three days to capture the diverse and powerful messaging from this year’s event.

Decarbonisation: Transition is tough

“It’s a really important reflection that everyone in the world is trying to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. While that’s an incredibly important ambition and we will globally deliver, there is going to be extraordinary cost pressure.” – Chamber of Minerals & Energy of Western Australia CEO, Rebecca Tomkinson

“Orica is part of what we call the hard to abate, which means expensive to abate, industries. We consume carbon to make a lot of valuable products … and by definition we are basically breaking carbon atoms. That leads to emissions.” – CEO of Orica, Sanjeev Gandhi

“The challenge, obviously, is who’s paying for this? Consumers are not willing to pay any kind of premium for a lower carbon product solution and this means that industries like ours have to find smart ways of funding this because nothing comes for free.” – Gandhi again

“A target is not a plan.” – veteran mining executive and Clean Energy Finance Corporation advisor, Stephen McIntosh, on Australia’s national 2050 net zero goal

“We have solutions coming to us faster than we would otherwise imagine. What we haven’t done is set our shop up with the profound change management requirements to pull it in as fast as it is coming to us. Remember, it’s coming with amazing cost outs. So simply, to the resources sector, you’ve got to go even harder at pulling it. And the hard bit is change management in your businesses, because the tech is actually the easy part now.” – McIntosh again

“It's going to be a significant challenge to sustain today's performance in a decarbonised world. I think the pace of change with what's happening with fleet management, automation and decarb is going to get overwhelming for some of us.” – head of autonomy & operations technology at Thiess, Trent Smith

“I know we all love to make it more complex when we start talking about electrons, but I think taking the communities that we operate in with us … allowing time in our very ambitious schedules to have that conversation about what role traditional owners may play [is key]. It is complicated and we're running at a million miles an hour, but I think we have to be genuine and fair.” – head of strategic service at BHP, Gabrielle Sycamore

“Regardless of the speed at which Australia transitions our trading partners are also transitioning. And the tricky part economically for Australia is that these are also the highest productivity sectors in the economy. The average gross value add per person in the mining sector and oil and gas is about a million dollars per person. And in the next highest, in financial services and tech, is $300,000.” – partner at McKinsey & Company, Victor Finkel

Collaboration is everywhere, and nowhere to be found

“One of the things I’ve observed in this industry in particular is that hesitancy to collaborate. And that's understandable. A lot of what we’re doing in mining is commoditised and in Australia we have a very broad consumer and competition act.” – principal and senior director at Schneider Electric, Lisa Zembrodt

“We never discussed costs. We just discussed the vision of what we wanted to do.” – senior vice president of Ma’aden's Gold and Base Metals business unit, Duncan Bradford, on the company’s partnership with Hexagon in Saudi Arabia

“When I look around the industry compared to 10 or 15 years ago, I think we're a lot more collaborative than we used to be.” – general manager digital technology & innovation at CITIC Pacific Mining and chair of the Global Mining Guidelines Group, Mark O’Brien

“It’s always seen as a zero sum game whereas I think in the new world there should be much more collaboration. We should be aping what Silicon Valley has done in terms of creating an organism where everybody works together because the problems that we are dealing with are very large, and together we will be stronger.” – CEO of CoTec Holdings, Julian Treger

“Our perspective on this is that the purest form of consent is equity. You can never argue you have not given consent if you're an equity holder. You then get in a position where you have some say in how the project is built, operated and closed.” – chief sustainability officer with the First Nations Major Project Coalition in Canada, Mark Podlasly

“We want to be partners in every sense of the word and sometimes that is hard for industry and regulators to understand because partnerships sometimes are actually about power and equity presents a challenge for people, because equity also provides a platform for First Nations groups that hasn't always been realised in Australia.” – chair of Gelganyem Trust, Kia Dowell

“One of the areas which could really help start-ups truly evolve and get to the next level is the ability to test. Unfortunately, it's a chicken and egg problem because if a start-up goes to a mining company and says, hey, here's this great technology, the mining company most often comes back, says, that's great: show me some data. How do you get that data without actually being allowed to test?” – managing director and founder of Prospect Innovation, Vivek Salgaocar

“Collaboration is critical to the energy transition. No one company has all the answers. I’m seeing more openness from the mining industry to look to the outside.” – CEO of Perenti, Mark Norwell

Changing the view

“We’re always judged on our least performing actor wherever they’re operating essentially.” – chief financial officer at the World Gold Council, Terry Heymann

“Fifteen years ago that smelter was called one of Australia’s big polluters. That’s now a green metal superpower. So it’s the same smelter producing the same commodity with the same workers and the same source of energy. It’s all about perception.” – The Australian Aluminium Council, Marghanita Johnson, on TAAC member Rio Tinto’s Bell Bay aluminium smelter in Tasmania

“One positive that we are seeing from this geopolitical tension rising through is that investors understand the narrative. People now understand the need for mining. So we are seeing a lot more generalists trying to get up to speed.” – portfolio manager at Pala Investments, Tom Solomon

“Our industry doesn't look like it did 50 years ago, and yet still the imagery is the same.” – Chamber of Minerals & Energy of Western Australia CEO, Rebecca Tomkinson

“I truly don’t think that there’s an industry that has a greater focus on uplifting and developing its young people.” – final-year University of New South Wales mining engineering student, Ashley Potter

“We need more copper than we've ever mined and processed before in the next 20 years. And we need to do this in in a way that is the most sustainable way we can possibly do it. We need to avoid any new negative and additional social impacts and we've got to continue to build more and more trust across the whole ecosystem.” – global managing partner, mining at ERM, Louise Pearce

Standards: Out with the old …

“What do standards do? They provide us with a universal guidance as to what good practice looks like.” – chief financial officer, World Gold Council, Terry Heymann

“What we are proposing is a multi-stakeholder governance model. I think this is a sea change for the mining industry because this is the mining industry saying, we want to move in the direction where there is multi-stakeholder oversight, input and I think a sense of commitment towards mining and responsible mining.” – Terry Heymann on mining’s new international consolidated standard

Heymann wraps up on why companies will adopt the standard: “What's the rationale? Quite simply, to have license to operate. I absolutely expect that within a few years we will see that in order to be a mining company you need to conform with the consolidated standard.

“At some point it will become untenable to get access to capital markets if you are not demonstrating compliance. That isn't meant as a threat. That's meant as an opportunity for the mining sector. We need that infusion of capital. This is a way to unlock that capital.”

“ESG is relevant to two stages of investment. On entry it is binary. If a project doesn't meet threshold ESG requirements, it's no go for us. On the other hand, enhancing ESG on the exit of the investment can create value.” – CEO of EMR Capital, Jason Chang

“You can’t create value unless you’ve got approval. You might not get an extra premium for it but if you're not doing [ESG well] you’re not going to go to dance.” – vice president sustainability at Evolution Mining, Fiona Murfitt

“Disclosure is the bugbear for a lot of different stakeholders and companies. We are very focused on quality of disclosure over quantity of disclosure. And when we talk about quality what we mean is … materiality.” – sustainable investing analyst at Fidelity International, Sue Lyn Stubbs

“I think from a financing perspective ESG is critical. It has to be there. It's like a minimum standard to operate.” – director and general manager, institutional at Export Finance Australia, Dan Smart

“At the moment we’ve got mandatory climate reporting. We will have mandatory nature reporting. I reckon that will happen sooner rather than later.” – head of sustainability at Sandfire Resources, Tzila Katzel

How green is my country?

“Australia’s mining sector has an unprecedented opportunity to lead the world in the transition to a circular economy.” – Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Foley

“I would build the biggest solar farm and wind farm on the planet, get our cost of electricity down to next to nothing. That will spawn an entire new industry where we can finally take our commodities, turn them into downstream green products that the world wants.” – CEO of Fortescue, Dino Otranto

“I think this is an area where Australia has a very strong calling card, which is the ESG principles that its companies are committed to.” – assistant secretary for energy resources at the Department of State, Geoffrey Pyatt

“When we talk about future made in Australia, my point is, let’s first preserve the present. If you have a base here for manufacturing, you have the skill set, you have the engineers, you can then transition into a future facing industry. You cannot do this without having a manufacturing base in the country. Australia has a terrible record of trying to maintain a manufacturing base. So this is extremely urgent.” – Orica CEO Sanjeev Gandhi

“We are clever enough to do this. We have the brightest minds. We do absolutely need to ensure we maintain our manufacturing and industry base in our nation today. And that's not just going to happen by happen stance.” – Chamber of Minerals & Energy of Western Australia CEO, Rebecca Tomkinson

“I see green iron as Australia's single biggest export opportunity.” – CEO of Climate Energy Finance, Tim Buckley

“I want the government to fund the first two DRI green iron facilities. I’m talking about $10 billion of our money, my children's money, all of our children's money, because that’ll mobilise an export industry that’s $100 billion a year of pure value-add for the next 50 years. And if we don’t do it we will lose the current $130 billion dollars a year of iron ore exports.” – Buckley expands on the opportunity he sees

“Let’s say after a couple of years because unlike Australia, Finland is run by engineers not legal teams.” – senior manager smelting at Metso, Timo Haimi, was asked how long it might take Finland to add small modular reactors to its nuclear power fleet.