NZ’s largest mine enhances environmental monitoring with SWARM

Imagine a life without any steel. Without cars, bikes, trains, or buses. Without an electricity grid to heat your home. Without tractors or trucks or ships to grow and deliver your food. 

A life without refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers that make our lives convenient.

No single material has done more to improve billions of human lives than steel. It provides everything from spoons to skyscrapers. The needles that vaccinated billions of people. Even the outer skin on SpaceX’s new Starship that will soon carry mankind to Mars.

The creation of the world’s essential supply of steel requires three ingredients: iron ore, carbon and energy. There is no better source of that carbon and energy than the extremely clean burning coal produced in the South Island of New Zealand.

Stockton Mine, on the upper West Coast of the South Island, produces some of the highest quality coal in the world and Bathurst Resources, who run the mine, employ the very latest technologies to help them extract the unique coal with the minimum impact on the environment.

Stockton, which is New Zealand’s largest coal producer, provides high-quality coking coal to steel makers in Japan, India, China, South Africa, Australia and Brazil. The coal that Stockton produces is of such high quality that it actually reduces the CO2 its customers emit, when producing a ton of steel, versus other types of coal.

The mine itself is located on a high alpine plateau and preservation of that stunning environment is an absolutely core value for the Bathurst team. World class environmental management practices, and a commitment to preserving local biodiversity, are non-negotiable requirements that determine every aspect of Bathurst operations and drive significant investments in IoT technology.

To enable continuous improvement in protection of onsite resources, the mine has implemented extensive water and air quality monitoring systems. While the mine itself has a high bandwidth wireless data solution, covering most of its footprint, to allow intensive monitoring, there are several remote streams that lie beyond the broadband network. To bring these remote bodies of water into the overall monitoring program, the Bathurst  team recently engaged with ioSphere to deploy a Swarm satellite based, water turbidity monitoring system using ioSphere’s latest Swarm IoT gateway.

Turbidity is the cloudiness or haziness of water (or another fluid) that is caused by individual suspended particles in the fluid that are generally invisible to the naked eye. It’s similar to smokiness in air.

This pilot solution was deployed on a beautiful and crystal clear mountain stream. The system incorporates an ioSphere IoT gateway connected to a Phathom water turbidity sensor that is lowered into the water. The system is powered by a 40 Watt solar panel and it is all mounted on a stainless steel frame that can withstand the extreme weather and flooding experienced in the region. 

The ioSphere team deployed the system with the help of Bathurst’s talented and highly experienced engineers. With the test site over an hour’s walk into a valley, and with a lot of equipment required, the ioSphere team were very grateful to hitch a lift on a passing helicopter to and from the site. This luxury also afforded the team an amazing view of the natural environment that Bathurst Resources is investing to protect.

Within minutes of the ioSphere system being installed in the stream, the water turbidity measurements were flowing from the sensor, through the ioSphere gateway, into the brand new Swarm satellite array passing overhead. The data is then transmitted by the satellites back down to ground stations, into the internet and then to Bathurst’s online environmental monitoring software. 

The data from the pilot is allowing Bathurst to monitor the stream’s cleanliness in real time to identify any changes in water quality. If the pilot is successful Bathurst see many more applications for Swarm based monitoring solutions using ioSphere’s unique gateways across their operation.

The Swarm based solution deployed by ioSphere offers Bathurst Resources and other mining operations, a uniquely low cost means of monitoring the quality of remote water resources and other environmental factors. This allows Bathurst to deploy more extensive monitoring than ever before to help deliver the company’s paramount commitment to be a responsible custodian of the mountain environment for the next 100 years.