Read the original article in Portal Minero here
According to the latest report from Statista, in 2022 copper production in Chile was 5.2 million metric tons, figures that continue to keep the country as the largest copper producer worldwide.
Technological innovations in mining are becoming increasingly important for the sector, enabling traceability and visibility, digitization of processes, safety for personnel, among others. According to the Digital Transformation Index, in terms of cloud usage alone, there was an increase from 75% in 2021 to 94% in 2022.
"This digitization offers multiple advantages to the mining companies. They can have detailed data from a logging process that is currently invisible or unreliable because there is a lot of manual intervention. Companies in the industry can begin to rely on generating secure and accurate data, which will lead them to make better decisions and be more strategic with resources," explains Patricio Rojas, CEO of Antara.
The national company Antara, with an important trajectory in the market, has established itself as a reference in the mining sector, accounting for 40% of the copper production in the country.
Traceability not only makes it possible to monitor the actual processes, i.e. production levels and quality, how the operational load is worked and distributed within the plant, even the way in which deliveries of the finished product are programmed, but also to know all the details of the product's life cycle, such as when it was produced, what its characteristics were, its composition, how long it was out in the open. In terms of sustainability, it even makes it possible to calculate the emissions made by the amount of copper produced.
"At Antara, we have been operating for more than 11 years with the country's main mining companies: BHP, Codelco, Antofagasta Minerals, Capstone, Teck, etc. In copper, today we are supporting the plant and logistic operations of around 40% of the mine copper that Chile produces and exports", says Antara's CEO.
They are currently in an expansion process, already active in Chile, Peru and Canada, and the plan for the next three years is to have significant operations in Canada, the United States and Australia, moving from copper and molybdenum to other minerals present in other countries.
