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Ahead of the game

From graduate to manager in less than a decade, with opportunities to travel across Australia and the globe, and a lifestyle that most would envy, today’s under-30s are reaping the rewards of a career in the resources industry

 

Kelsea Kurtzer

Senior Engineer, OZ Minerals

 

Growing up in the Flinders Ranges gave Kelsea Kurtzer an appreciation for the beauty of regional and remote Australia, so it is little surprise she feels at home working at Prominent Hill mine in northern South Australia where, less than five years after graduating university and joining OZ Minerals, she has secured the position of senior engineer.

 

But it’s not just the beauty of the above-ground landscape Kurtzer relishes – there’s a world of wonder below the surface, too. 

 

“I often say the year I spent underground was one of the best years of my life,” she says. 

Since her time underground, opportunities for career advancement have come thick and fast. “Once I finished my 12 months underground, I went into the short-term scheduling space then moved into drill and blast, before I got promoted into medium-term planning and now I’m the senior engineer on site with two others in the production space,” she says.

 

As a self-confessed “homebody”, Kurtzer, 28, sees her future firmly based in South Australia but relishes the knowledge and skills she has gained can take her anywhere in the world. 

“I have two friends who started out at Prominent Hill with me and have gone on to work for companies that have allowed them to work overseas while still basing themselves in Australia,” she says. “The opportunities are definitely there – it’s such a global skillset.” 

 

Having two weeks at home between shifts means Kurtzer and her husband can spend quality time together enjoying the best South Australia has to offer. “I get to live this wonderful life where I can walk the dog at the beach, spend time with family and have adventures near and far,” she says. “We live in a wonderful part of the world.”

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing solutions

Giving other scientists access to its mining data has been a groundbreaking experience for OZ Minerals

 

OZ Minerals never wanted to be just one of the crowd, but it has invited the “crowd” in to help it unearth new drilling targets around its Prominent Hill mine in SA’s north. In a move almost unprecedented in mining circles, the company released usually confidential geological data to the world in hopes it might result in finding more ore bodies like Prominent Hill. 

 

“OZ Minerals has spent a lot of time and money trying to find another Prominent Hill,” says head of exploration and growth, Richard Holmes. “It’s the old adage that the best place to find a new ore body is within sight of the headframe (the frame above a mine shaft). For many years, we’ve been drilling around Prominent Hill and had very little success. So we needed to change the paradigm.”

In a bold move, OZ Minerals decided sharing the data with scientists outside the industry might allow fresh eyes on the problem and lead to discovering innovative ways of working. “We decided to use the crowd to generate new drill targets, so we partnered with Perth company Unearthed, who compiled all our geological data and then released it to the crowd,” Holmes says.

“That’s pretty groundbreaking ... mining and exploration companies consider the data they generate as their intellectual property, and sharing and collaborating with that data was a huge step forward.” 


The Explorer Challenge, with a $1 million prize pool, eventuated in December 2018 and, by June 2019, had produced results. The approach by entrants from more than 50 countries created “a raft of new targets” to consider and test, some that challenged traditional geological thinking. Work on the first ground targets began late last year but has been suspended during the coronavirus pandemic.

The genius of putting the information in the hands of data scientists is that they can bring the massive power of computers to the process of analysing reams of facts and figures. There are many components to mining data, such as assays that test the make-up and quality of mineral ore. “The human mind can probably correlate five or six of those but, when you start using significant computing power, you can start correlating 30 to 40 of those,” Holmes says. “Then it can integrate other data sets, overlaying geology, geophysics, geochemistry, as many as you can get.” 

In the meantime, OZ Minerals has opened up new ways of working that are proving productive for all.

“We have subsequently worked with a number of the groups who took part,” Holmes says. “We are collaborating with the crowd, using skills from different industries and taking different viewpoints.”

While the Explorer Challenge was a huge undertaking, OZ Minerals has since worked to establish a series of mini challenges. “If we have a problem, we tackle it the traditional way but also we say, ‘All right here’s a discreet piece of work, let’s put it out to the crowd and see what they think’,” Holmes says. 

 

New companies have also emerged from the process, with groups who entered the challenge 

 

 

Road to new discoveries

OZ Minerals is driving forwards through collaborative working 

 

Finding smarter, more sustainable ways of working has become part of OZ Minerals’ DNA. The company’s quest to keep improving on traditional, top-down problem solving has seen it set up study teams comprising people from inside and outside the industry to work on solutions for its future. 

 

“OZ Minerals is a modern mining company, we’re interested in innovation and looking for safer, faster, and more efficient ways of doing our work,” says Gabrielle Iwanow, general manager Prominent Hill, a copper-gold mine located 130km south-east of Coober Pedy. 

 

Prominent Hill takes a collaborative approach to its operation, and lessons learnt are shared across the business, and vice versa. Studies manager Kate Hobbs says this open approach means great ideas are not siloed to one area. 

 

“For example, my team is sharing learnings and lessons with the West Musgrave Project team, where they are looking at how to reduce the project’s energy requirements, and harness renewable energy. We are also working closely with the OZ Minerals Carrapateena expansion team and collaborating with stakeholders and other companies from the industry.”

 

Hobbs’ team is charged with assessing opportunities to further extend Prominent Hill’s mine life and make the most of the resource asset. “It’s challenging but exciting work, as we look at what’s going to add the most value – not just financially, but also from a safety perspective, and how we can use the ore body more responsibly,” Hobbs says.

 

A clear view on the potential underground expansion is expected in late 2020.

 

We gave the world Wi-fi

Wi-fi was developed in the radiophysics lab at CSIRO in the 1990s. The technology was a revolution in mobile computing and is today estimated to be in more than 5 billion electronic devices. For its efforts, CSIRO has earned more than $430 million through licensing agreements with tech companies since 1996.

– Source: MCA