Australian Mining spoke with FM Global’s Michael Beaumont about his latest white paper highlighting the importance of loss prevention in the mining industry.
For FM Global account engineering group manager Mike Beaumont, working in the mining industry is part of his lineage.
His uncle was on the board of directors for several large Canadian mining companies and his father was born in Kirkland Lake, a gold mining town in northern Ontario.
Image: FM Global
It’s fitting that Beaumont ended up conducting risk engineering visits at gold mines when he first arrived in Australia about 30 years ago.
Throughout his career, Beaumont has specialised in the mining industry with a particular interest in the metallurgical refining field, writing papers and articles about risks and loss in the industry.
Beaumont’s latest whitepaper, ‘Understanding Mining Industry Loss Trends and Predictive Analytics’, provides valuable insights into the drivers of loss and ways to prevent and reduce it.
“FM Global has been investing in predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop several risk prediction models and help our clients conduct risk improvement and build resilience,” Beaumont said.
“My desire with this whitepaper was to tie the analytics and supporting loss history back to the mining industry and make it more relevant to the sector to then be used to help identify areas where losses could be prevented.”
As a multinational commercial property insurer, FM Global currently covers more than 300 mine sites around the world.
Beaumont’s whitepaper analyses loss history trends across the global mining industry, showing more than 400 recorded losses at mine sites over the past two decades.
Fire incidents and equipment breakdowns were the top two loss drivers, with fire accounting for 21 per cent of losses over the past 20 years and 27 per cent of all losses on mine sites over the past five years.
According to Beaumont, the increased use of plastics in the construction of buildings and equipment is driving higher fire incidents.
“Once a fire is out of control, the outcomes can be catastrophic,” he said. “When you have a bank of plastic separating spirals or similar equipment and it burns down, that can affect all the product streams and the impacts can be huge.
“If you manage change and control human factors and maintenance, you will stop many of these events.”
FM Global recommends focusing on equipment factors such as maintenance, contingency planning, operating conditions, age and history, environment, operators and safety devices to minimise losses.
“Predictive maintenance enables you to identify where you’re most likely to have a breakdown or incident and where to focus your resources, whether it’s time or capital,” Beaumont said.
“You can’t have a spare of everything. Using insights from loss history and predictive analytics can allow people to better make capital decisions.
“Contingency planning helps you make more informed decisions on where best to invest capital, whether it’s in sparring, additional protection systems, interlocking different approaches or where you need to devote more people resources. You’ll know what you need, where to get it and how to get it to the site. If miners think about those things ahead of time, they’re going to be way ahead of the game.”
Beaumont has seen the appetite for risk management methods such as predictive maintenance and contingency planning evolve and grow over the past 15–20 years.
“What I’ve seen is middle-market miners come to the realisation that they cannot afford to be out of business,” Beaumont said.
“Risk management is more widely embraced in the sector. This has seen a few of our clients evolve from having a roguish attitude to being a well risk-managed company.”
FM Global is interested in partnering with companies that want to go above and beyond the risk management basics.
“We’re trying to get our whitepaper out there because we think it will shed some light on important loss trends and give organisations another risk management tool,” Beaumont. “Hopefully down the road we can partner with these companies as well.”
This feature appeared in the March 2024 issue of Australian Mining.