Chile’s State-owned Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, will press ahead with plans to roll out automation of its mining operations as it seeks to maintain production levels into the future amid declining ore grades and the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, its chief executive said on Friday.
The progress of Codelco’s digitalisation agenda has strained relations with the unions because of the potential for technological advances reducing the need for manual labour.
Technological development is however critical to ensuring the longer-term viability of mining, Codelco CEO Octavio Araneda said in a seminar hosted in the capital Santiago.