steel is the foundation of our entire society and there are two main ingredients to make steel this is one of them here iron ore and we are here in Western Australia with riotinto to find out how they make [Music] it most young men in their 20s want to visit places like Vegas or or even MOS but me I've always wanted to visit somewhere called the pilra Yep this is the spot a seemingly Barren 200,000 square mile expanse in Western Australia now iron seems pretty uninteresting to most people but it's one of two key ingredients to Steel the stuff that supports our transportation homes power grid and pretty much every other aspect of modern society and the pillur produced produces more iron than any other region in the world so this is part one of a two-part series all about what it takes to mine transport and ship iron ore to meet Global demand in this video specifically we're exploring the gudai Dari mine one of Rio tent's 16 iron ore operations in the pbra it started in 2022 has an expected mind life of about 40 years and produces about 40 million tons of of iron ore every single [Music] year after traveling all the way across Australia we caught a chartered plane from Perth directly to the Min sight they call this work fly in fly out as the entire Workforce flies in and lives on site so we spent the night on site at the amazing camp we ate probably too much food at the canteen and set out first thing in the morning to check out the entire operation [Music] [Music] like any Hard Rock mining operation you've got to fluff it up a bit before you can dig it that's when the drills come into play there are four autonomous drills here as you can see right there it says autonomous on the side there is no operator necessary it can not only drill down a row but it can also move over rows on this site they're actually controlled in Perth which is about a two-hour flight from where we are right now riotinto has a state-of-the-art command center where they control drills they water carts and the trucks from this site all entirely remotely they do have a team onsite as well to manage everything and to make sure everything is safe and sound but these drills are technically being controlled many many many many kilometers away which is bananas today's shot scheduled for 9:00 a.m. is just up there the exclusion zone for equipment from that blast is 300 M in all directions the exclusion zone for people is 600 m in all directions these drills are typically within that 600 M but they're outside the 300 M so they are topping them up with water right now but while the blast is going on and the pit is shut down these drills will still be drilling because there are no people inside of them before we go shoot today's shot this is this weekend's shot within the next few days this has been drilled by the autonomous drills there's 1,60 holes here and now it's time for The Blasters to load and tie in each one they are 12 M deep holes 250 mm in diameter each one of these holes is drilled by that autonomous drill as the drill goes through the Earth it Maps each hole and so the blasters can create a very specific blast plan so that every hole is loaded to exactly as it needs to be loaded for perfect fragmentation through here that truck there has GPS which is loading the ammonium nitrate the blasting product into each hole as the augur goes over that hole it knows exactly what holes it's at it has that drilling information has that blasting information and loads that hole with the exact right amount of explosives once all of this is loaded it will make a very big boom and speaking of Boom booms let's go set today shot off always manual y insert blue dongle you got the blue dongle CH that in insert okay that's one the Simon had yeah so I'll just Chuck that down cuz that now does its test just let it be got a few minutes true are you there right uh yeah so we'll head straight back down uh you probably can't see it so like the wind row like way at the back there yeah the other box of this and the loggers is set up there I see cuz you got to have line of sight yeah um so first thing we'll do we'll con off the entrances but then all our wire and gears out so we got to pick pick all that up and then other people can help get all the coins okay okay oh yeah all right here we go yeah hate that delay there we [Music] go thanks I appreciate it you can send us the invoice Bo yeah yeah yeah well that was a [Music] blast we have drilled with the autonomous drills we have blasted we even got to press the button we can cut that out if we didn't get to press the button and now we are at the loading process they have four caterpillar 6060s which are 600 ton excavators and three cat 9 94 loaders to load a fleet of 26793 autonomous Hall trucks this is the iron ore right here it is very very heavy how they know where the iron ore is is based on the drilling so they've done all kinds of exploration before they've come in here and then every single hole after it's drilled is tested to see what kind of grade of iron ore is in each Hill and then once the excavators come in here and start digging they dig through these boxes of known hey this is high- grade this is mid-grade this is low grade and then based on where that excavator is digging what material it's putting into what trucks is where the trucks go from here whether it's the crusher whether it's the waste whether it's the pad Western Australia is famous for iron or this is the biggest region of iron ore in the entire world this is really really good stuff the strip ratio is almost non-existent out here compared to other iron ore mines they you have to strip less than one part uh waste material to get one part iron ore out here as we've talked about the main production excavators are 6060 600 ton excavators they load the trucks between four and five passes very quickly they have these loaders out here what is the difference between the big loader and the big excavator the big excavator is the preferred production unit but these loaders here are a lot more flexible you can load off of a face you can move them around to here to there you can load out of the stockpile you can clean up with them you can get them out of the way very quickly when there's a blast they're a lot more flexible because of those rubber tires and for you OB stute observers they run those steel chains on the front too as they're digging into that face to protect those rubber tires which are some of the most expensive in the world from those abrasions as it's in the face with all this equipment on site it's no surprise they have a nice shop let's check that out next all the shovels loaders dozers drills and trucks on site don't run by accident they have to have an amazing service program to keep everything moving if machine re is not moving it's not moving or it's not making money so the more time you can keep these moving and Hauling material the better the autonomous trucks are pretty slick because they'll automatically cycle themselves into the shop here depending on what intervals they have every mine doesn't work on just when equipment breaks down it works on when equipment was serviced last so if this machine was serviced 250 hours ago the computer knows when that was serviced and then the next 250 hours it's brought in they do what they need to do whether it's um testing the the fluids changing hoses doing a general inspection and then after about 12 hours of work this truck will be back out into the pit out here they don't just have autonomous trucks and drills but they have the I believe these are the world's first or were the world's first autonomous water carts so they're 789 frames how many liters tens of thousands of liters a lot of water on the back of this truck it has the same system as the trucks do you have the GPS receivers you have the liar and then you have the radar on the front of the truck they're completely autonomous they're still working out the technology but as of right now it Maps the mine and it knows when roads have been watered and then it's also using the radar and the lighter to pick up the dust to determine how much water it needs to place on the roads out here this is really really important technology because water's at a premium so they want to keep the dust down they want to water all the roads as efficiently as possible to use as little water as they can to do the job and that's when these things come into play there's four of them on site [Music] believe it or not they go through a lot of air filters out here all right now that we've had fun in the pit in the shop it's time to see the second aspect of the process here on site the plant [Music] this plant's main purpose is to size the iron ore below me is the conveyor of the premium product that's the lumpy stuff it's small rocks that's going out for export from here and then they have a fine product as well that's the Lesser product but still valuable iron ore so this entire setup here is filled with Shaker decks to get the size just right because that's exactly what the Mills want okay from the crusher they feed 8 to 10,000 tons per hour into this this is the main part of the plant there are seven different screen decks here all that's happening is the material is put in at the top and there's shaking really vigorously with different size screens Within These different Shaker decks and all it's doing is separating the material they want the coarse material they want the really big stuff and then they want the fines the really big stuff will go back through to the crusher to get broken down a little a little bit further that coar stuff right in between is sent out a conveyor at one end and then that fine stuff is another product that also goes out the other end after those conveyors it goes to those piles out there that's all finished product those are the Stockyards they can keep about a little over a million tons of finished iron ore product that more course premium product and that finer product in corresponding piles and then when a train comes in which we'll see here in a moment train comes in they can fire up that reclaimer which is essentially a bucket wheel excavator that picks up the ore across that pile throws it onto a conveyor and carries it over to the train load out area our next stop was the lab where riotinto essentially studies the or body to understand how best to mine and blend the various or grades to make one product the lab atory is fully automated with samples entering the building by conveyors and robots moving the material through each process due to the noise in the lab I'm going to explain what the heck was going on after the fact now our guide Brendan first started showing us the shelves where all the samples are stored each of these samples is from an individual drill hole from within the pit and these samples are tracked with RFID technology the tracking is key because then it helps mining Crews understand the or grade of the material after testing next Brendan showed us the fully automated portion of the lab where robots grab weigh and test each sample while it may look hectic this is one well-oiled machine [Music] now for our final stop load out this is where the iron ore pours into rail cars for transport this is the final step in the iron ore mining process here at G idari the rail car load out each train is about 240 cars each train carries about 28,00 ,000 tons of ore it takes less than 200 minutes per train to load and they load between 5 to six trains every single day 365 days a [Music] year that concludes our visit to gai Dori here with Rio Tinto in Western Australia in the pilra that's part one of getting the iron ore we need for steel ooh in the ear part two will be how we get the iron from here onto ships to send it all over the world thanks again to riento for having us out I hope you enjoyed it until next time stay dirty everybody oh boy