Bloomberg Businessweek USA - October 30, 2017

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY ULYSSES ORTEGA FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

 TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017

Surrounded by sagebrush and pinyon pine in a

remote part of Nevada, the city of Elko appears out

of the desert as if from another era, with its strip

of 1960s neon-lit motels and casinos. But down

the highway a stretch, the scene is unmistakably

21st century.

○ Barrick and Cisco say their sensor-

packed system will make mining safer,

cleaner, and more efficient

A More Automated

Gold Mine

Seventy-five miles outside town, Barrick Gold

Corp. is a year into the gold mining industry’s most

ambitious experiment to modernize digging. At

Barrick’s analytics and unified operations center,

a long bank of enormous screens and rows of com-

puters analyze data collected from thousands of

sensors that record virtually all activity at and

around the vast underground Cortez mine. The

idea is to use Silicon Valley monitoring technol-

ogy to mine more gold at cheaper rates while

reducing injuries and pollution. “Literally every

single aspect of the business should change,” says

Executive Chairman John Thornton.

In the past year, Barrick’s team—with help from

Cisco Systems Inc.—has built Cortez’s operations

center, wired the mine with underground Wi-Fi

and sensors, increased its use of remote-control

equipment and vehicles, and created an in-house

software team called C0dem1ne. Digging costs at

the subterranean 1,300-worker Cortez mine have

fallen from $190 a ton to $140, and so far the team

is under its $50 million budget for 2017.

While that doesn’t sound like much for a

company with a market value of $18.8 billion, Chief

Operating Officer Richard Williams, a former officer

with the U.K.’s Special Air Service, has approached

the project with military precision. Drawing on

his experience in Iraq, where electronic networks

allowed commanders to view a whole battlefield in

real time, Williams says he’s working to integrate

hundreds of incremental tech-driven improve-

ments at Barrick’s three Nevada mines over the

next 24 months, betting that the efficiency gains

will add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Other mines, he says, will follow.

Barrick’s bigger mines will require far more

THE BOTTOM LINE Amazon’s nine-figure tax incentives in Ohio

have strained local public services as the state’s employment

growth continues to lag the national average.

agencies such as JobsOhio, says Yost, though he

acknowledges that “it is better than the vacuum we

had before.”

“Annual reports and redacted records aren’t

enough to make a judgment about how well this

agency is doing,” Yost says, referring to the current

system of JobsOhio disclosures. “I don’t think anyone

outside the organization has enough information.

It’s pretty much, ‘This is the way it is, these are the

numbers, trust us.’ ” In West Licking, Little says his

medics and firefighters are lucky to even get that

much. “We are the last ones,” he says, “to find out we

won’t be getting any money.” —Mya Frazier