Abstract
As the global interest in sustainable energy sources has increased, lithium has emerged as a vital resource, playing a crucial role in the transition towards a cleaner and more efficient economy, but with this comes important challenges. So, it is imperative for the lithium industry to prioritize ESG measures. In this work we present how the Chilean lithium mining industry becomes a safer and more compliant industry using digital transformation.
In the context of the lithium industry and considering the indicators of worldwide mining production in 2022, Chile is considering the second producer of lithium and the first country with reserves of lithium worldwide. In 2018, the 2 main companies that operate all the lithium mines in Chile, were managing their safety, health, and environmental risk in a similar way, by hand and through paper. Some of the data was processed in spreadsheets, and engineers had to collect by e-mail the reports for each area to build their legal compliance and the indicators of sustainability, making it hard to make decision based on data. Using this opportunity and through a system that allowed the digitalization of ESG management and processes, we saw astounding results.
The proposed solution was achieved by loading the standards and compliance of various regional and international regulations. Then proceeded to carry out the customized configuration of different processes and their integrated management systems. Additionally, their sites, work areas and task were also configured. With these previous steps, it was ensured that workers could report their activities accurately and all this information, was automatically synchronized with the cloud.
After a period of implementation, we saw a considerable decrease in incidents from a pick of over 140 incidents on the end of 2019 to less than 40 on early 2020, achieving a diminish of 60% approximately of the accumulated accidents between 2019 and 2020, maintaining the minimized accident behaviour in the following years. We consider that this results are due mainly to two reasons, first, the incidents began to be reported immediately, investigated and having as a result an action plan defined, with specific responsibilities, ensuring accountability of the different actors, and allowing the cross-application of lessons learned in the various work areas of the companies where similar risk existed, on the other hand, we implemented the critical control verification and field leadership programs, being able to identify critical risks, and how to assess them, detecting minimal and necessary evidence to ensure proper control, allowing to identify deviations and solve them with immediate corrective actions, this allowed to take proactive measures to prevent serious accidents. In addition, the leadership program allowed the active participation of the command lines, improving the cultural influence of the leaders on the organizational culture.
In conclusion, the digitalization of processes allowed the fast detection of risk potential actions and conditions, the quick correction of them, the data based decision-making strategies and facilitating organizations the advance on the maturity of their safety culture and promoting it.