Chilean mining faces challenges on a world scale, from automation to the development of technologies that perceives safer and more efficient underground mines. With this in mind, the Open Innovation Program on Mining, Expande, and the National Pilotage Center for Mining Technologies, CNP, has made great strides in defining technological solutions that respond to the gaps the mining industry still needs to fill.
So, within the framework of the cooperation arrangement signed in mid-2018 whilst responding to the challenges of the mining industry, the National Pilotage Center will test new technologies on an industrial scale with world-standard tech validation protocols, and Expande will then have at its disposal a broad base of suppliers often requiring pilotage spaces. Moreover, both institutions will analyze what pilotage needs there are among the suppliers of the ecosystem.
According to Enrique Molina, Executive Director of Expande, “with this agreement, we are ensuring that suppliers gain greater and ongoing access to operational installations that enable them to validate their technologies. This a huge step forward for the ecosystem, where our program also provides knowhow, in the short and medium term, of the huge challenges facing mining companies and which need to be settled immediately”.
“We shall comply with our role of identifying a tech solution that has a certain degree of development and which we shall associate with a challenge to the mining industry so as to subsequently recommend the one that has to be validated and certified by the National Pilotage Center”, added the executive.
Meanwhile, Juan Cariamo, Chairman of the National Pilotage Center for mining Technologies (CNP) insisted on the need for parties within the mining ecosystem to take part in supporting the new public policies on mining and thus achieve more innovatory technologies with a real market impact.
“If we want to capitalize on the opportunities available in Chile and become a developed country, we all have to support, cooperate and strengthen the new technologies within the field of mining. Along these lines, it will be necessary to establish long term relations for synergies and cooperate mutually so that any company wishing to develop technologies linked to mining receives the benefits”.
“We want to create a new layer in the Chilean economy of intensive suppliers in the use of knowhow, defy the world as an industry and grow“, the representative from Minnovex also pointed out.
Both institutions discussed the challenges facing them and they agreed on common aims, establishing spaces for cooperation in aid of innovation, scientific development and the transfer of tech knowhow, the exchange of relevant information and the establishment of networks of collaboration and tech innovation between the parties.
