By James Simms

NEWMAN, Australia – “Pink cupcakes – yeah! That’s International Women’s Day at other companies. Not at Roy Hill,” says Nethra Nair, the production engineer at the mining company’s massive Port Hedland iron ore loading facility on the Indian Ocean.

Nair, an ebullient, 28-year-old woman of Indian descent who grew up around the world before her family settled in Perth, says the company set up a half-day professional development seminar that day to discuss how to deal with different workplace scenarios and what career paths Roy Hill Holdings and the mining industry offered.

“I’ve never worked at a place that has put forward the cause of women quite so effectively. When I worked at another company, you were just a number,” she says, noting that three out of the five port engineers are female and that the engineering operations chief is too.

For someone who usually runs around during the day checking on operations and trouble shooting to ensure final ore quality and loading, like many other port staff, taking time off for a workshop was unusual. “They actually sat us all down,” she says during a break, her face a bit smudged with what’s dubbed a “Pilbara tan” – named after the superfine, reddish iron ore dust that coats many and most everything in the Pilbara region.

Throughout the Roy Hill complex, pink is emblazoned on everything from 500-ton dump trucks to railway ore cars and even some of the fluorescent work shirts – all to raise awareness for breast cancer patients and research.  The driving force behind this commitment is Roy Hill’s Chairman and Director Mrs Gina Rinehart.  She’s also ensured some of the three-story tall, pink trucks have the names of employee survivors of the disease on them, and the company matches staff donations to fight breast cancer, a leading cause of death for women globally.

That color doesn’t quite comport with the mining sector’s image of being big, tough and male. The first two descriptions still apply but the last one less and less so. Indeed, more women are taking industry positions, including as truck drivers, excavator operators, engineers and managers and, at 20%, Roy Hill’s percentage of female employees is actually a couple points above the sector average.

The iron ore market, like other traded commodities, has its ups and downs. But unlike some of those, the product requires enormous amounts of capital investment, similar to oil and gas projects, before the first ton is ever mined – not to mention processed and shipped.

The Roy Hill undertaking entailed the largest project-finance loan for a land-based commodity development in the world at USD 7.2 billion and was completed on budget and on schedule. With one of the lowest costs globally to extract the mineral, the mine started shipments in December 2015 and ramped up production six months earlier than scheduled.

Roy Hill’s plan to apply automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other new technology was set out from the start and helped by the fact that it was the last major Pilbara mine to open.

Already, for example, the remote operations center in Perth, some 1,300 km away from the mine, handles the loading and unloading of the 236-car trains and the giant machines moving the ore in the mine and port stockyards. Introduction of autonomous drill rigs, which bore 25-meter deep holes for inserting blasting material to loosen the hardened ground, over the past year and a half have led to a 15% productivity improvement.

“A lot of the technology that underpins our remote operations center and various parts of the operation are industry leading technology and practice,” says Mike Lomman, general manager of demand chain. “We had a clean sheet to design and implement the latest technology to build efficiency into our organization.”