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How the dirty and dangerous job of coal mining is getting a digital makeover by firms like Huawei

For traditional coal miners, work can be a scene from hell.

Descending into the dark 100-metres below ground via narrow shafts, miners dig out black gold amid clouds of dust, sweat and the shattering noise from giant shearing machines used to cut through rocks.

This kind of mining is regarded as one of the most demanding jobs in China, and there are special provisions in law to allow these workers - almost exclusively male - to retire at the age of 55 instead of the usual 60.

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It is also extremely dangerous, with accidents claiming the lives of hundreds of people every year. According to China government data, 614 deaths were recorded annually on average over the past five years from all types of mining accidents.

However, technology is transforming China's coal mining industry. Fu Shaohui is a coal miner from the northern Chinese province of Shaanxi. He works at Hongliulin coal mine, one of the largest in the country, which has adopted remote sensors, imaging and automatic control technologies to make coal mining more efficient and safer.

This means Fu does not need to go underground as often as before.

Digging machines can now be operated from an above-ground control room, where live-feed videos and real-time data of the working face are displayed on multiple screens, including temperature and gas levels. This technology revolution is powered by Huawei Technologies' 5G network infrastructure.

With the help of four blast-proof 5G base stations installed between underground hydraulic props, Fu and another six miners can simply make video calls to communicate with colleagues in the control room above as they supervise production and carry out periodic maintenance.

This marks a big difference from having to operate the machines manually for hours on end. They can also hold occasional video chats with friends and family during any downtime.

"We used to have 13 people below ground for one shift, but now we are down to seven. Soon we will only need five people working underground on the coalface," said Fu.

A Huawei 5G base station at the working face in a coal mine in Shaanxi on April 25, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang alt=A Huawei 5G base station at the working face in a coal mine in Shaanxi on April 25, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang>

The cooperation between Shenzhen-based Huawei and Shaanxi Coal Industry, the state-owned company that operates the mine, is just one example of the digital upgrading of China's economy, including the deployment of 5G networks. For President Xi Jinping, the transformation of traditional industries is just as important as developing new emerging industries.

With Huawei's once-lucrative smartphone business under attack in recent years from US trade sanctions that have cut off its access to high-end chips, the telecoms giant has shifted towards providing industrial solutions.

Huawei has set up several business groups, known as legions or "juntuan" in Chinese, to serve a variety of industries such as ports and hospitals. Mining was the first industry Huawei targeted, forging a high profile partnership with coal mines that was endorsed by founder Ren Zhengfei himself in 2021.

The coal mining industry, starved of tech industry interest for years, is just the "low-hanging fruit" for Huawei, said Xu Jun, chief technology officer of Huawei's Mine business unit.

Yet the move towards industrial solutions has not been an immediate revenue and profit booster. Huawei reported first-quarter revenue of 132.1 billion yuan (US$20 billion), a marginal rise of 0.8 per cent from the 131 billion yuan in the same period last year.

One working face at the Xiaobaodang coal mine on April 26, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang alt=One working face at the Xiaobaodang coal mine on April 26, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang>

The intelligent upgrade has helped cut the number of workers needed underground at the coalface by half and drastically reduced their workload, as the miners only need to intervene when a problem arises, according to Shi Chao, head of intelligent mining at Hongliulin Coal Mine.

"Our ultimate goal is to have no workers underground at all," Shi told reporters and industry insiders during a recent tour arranged by Huawei and attended by the South China Morning Post.

As the world's biggest coal-producing country with 4,000 mines, China aims to make its large-scale and most hazardous mines "smart" by 2025, and eventually roll out this modernisation to all coal mines by 2035, according to a guideline on the digital upgrade of the mining industry issued by eight state agencies in 2020.

With the national-level guidelines, China is banking on technology to improve safety and ensure stable supplies.

In February, an open-pit coal mine collapsed in Inner Mongolia, leaving at least 53 people dead or missing. Of the 367 mine accidents and 518 mine deaths reported in China last year, 168 accidents and 245 of the fatalities were specifically related to coal mines, according to official data.

Currently, over 1,000 working coalfaces have undergone intelligent upgrades, covering 620 million tonnes of annual production, according to National Energy Administration data released this month. By the end of 2022, total investment in smart mine development in China reached nearly 200 billion yuan, according to the NEA.

However, out of the 4,400 coal mines in China in operation at the end of last year, only 572 of them were using smart technology, according to the annual report of the trade group China National Coal Association.

Analysts also say Huawei's mining initiative could be a hard slog, as multiple stakeholders are needed to support communication systems in mines, typically including a certified equipment supplier and a telecoms company for web connections.

"How to balance out the vested interests between these different parties and make a profit from the business is not an easy task, even for Huawei," said Yang Guang, a senior principal analyst covering the telecoms sector at research firm Omdia.

Telecoms equipment used for mining also needs special adjustments to incorporate anti-explosion features, which increases equipment costs, said Yang.

Huawei's intelligent mining system has significantly reduced the number of coal miners working underground. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang alt=Huawei's intelligent mining system has significantly reduced the number of coal miners working underground. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang>

Since China embarked on a nationwide 5G development plan in June 2019, the country's three biggest telecoms service providers have built extensive 5G networks underpinned by more than 2.6 million 5G base stations as of end-March this year. Huawei and its crosstown rival ZTE won most of the 5G base station contracts from these state-backed telecoms providers, according to data from Chinese telecoms contract websites.

5G is seen as a revolutionary force when it comes to digitalising traditional heavy industry sectors, such as mining, ports and steel.

However, 5G technology has its limitations and is not expected to replace all wired networks at the current time, according to Ed Gubbins, principal analyst at GlobalData.

"Whether it's mines or most any other use case, fibre can generally deliver faster speeds and greater reliability than cellular networks. So 5G is only likely to take the place of fibre where fibre isn't feasible to deploy or is not cost-effective enough," Gubbins said.

There are multiple use cases for 5G in the mining industry, which include aiding autonomous or remotely-controlled unmanned vehicles that require low latency to ensure the safety of controlling the machines, and another major application is in surveillance, said Gubbins.

"Where surveillance video feeds can be relayed via fibre, companies will likely use fibre," Gubbins said. "But if there are places in the mine where laying fibre isn't feasible, 5G can help, because it has the network capacity to transmit that bandwidth-rich video in downlink and uplink channels."

In Huawei's project with Shaanxi Coal, the telecoms gear maker is not only installing 5G base stations but also offering cloud computing and AI capabilities that together create a digital replica of the underground operation on an online platform in the command room.

The biggest challenge has been to unify the standards of data collected from machinery, sensors, cameras and various devices made by different suppliers, and eventually allow them to communicate with each other, said Ai Zhonghua, the Huawei engineer heading the Hongliulin project.

The intelligent operation centre developed by Huawei at the Xiaobaodang coal mine on April 26, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang alt=The intelligent operation centre developed by Huawei at the Xiaobaodang coal mine on April 26, 2023. Photo: SCMP / Tom Wang>

With unified standards, the system managed to connect 2,700 underground devices and transfer 170 million pieces of data each day to the command room in Hongliulin.

A similar system was also implemented in Xiaobaodang, another coal mine in Shenmu 70 kilometres away from Hongliulin, laying the foundation for the mine's pilot test of autonomous driving cars underground. When it is operational, miners will be able to hail an unmanned shuttle bus, enabled by 5G, via their smartphone, to travel across the underground tunnels.

In power and water facilities such as substations, patrol robots have freed human workers from their monitoring responsibilities, as the robots move around the space and send back real-time footage.

Xiaobaodang has invested nearly 1 billion yuan in the past four years on digital upgrade projects, said Li Jie, the head of the Intelligent Mining Project at the mine, with barely any subsidies from the government.

The central and local governments have launched schemes to provide financial support to partially cover the costly deployment of smart technology for selected projects. For instance, security upgrade projects using smart technology can apply for a maximum of 30 million yuan in subsidies or 25 per cent of their cost, according to a January plan by agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission.

Based on the forecast of increasing the penetration rate of smart mining technology from 15 per cent in 2021 to 50 per cent in 2025, the market is worth 271 billion yuan by 2025, Minsheng Securities estimated in a report last year.

For mining companies, an intelligent upgrade could improve profits by 7 to 12 per cent and return on investment by 2 to 3 per cent, according to a 2020 report by McKinsey & Company.

Investment in 5G and other technologies is driven both by the regulatory requirements for safety as well as the need to improve efficiency, Huawei's Xu said.

"Mining is a highly regulated industry. The regulators have a very strong voice in this, especially in China," Xu said. "The regulator is pushing and ... the return on investment and the benefits are the pull factors. These are working hand in hand."

Additional reporting by Che Pan

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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