Episode 35: The rise of responsible gold

The transcript highlights below have been edited for clarity 

Mark Lee 

Welcome to this next episode of the Sustainable Connections podcast. I'm Mark Lee, the Global Director of Thought Leadership at ERM. We're delighted that you've chosen to listen to this one to learn a little bit about what's going on in a corner of the gold mining industry with a really interesting company. We've talked a bit about mining on the podcast before, and we've put that often in the context of the low-carbon economy. I tend to think mining companies are under some unique pressure; it's a difficult business. It's an energy intensive business. They're doing this work, work we all want, for resources we all need under pressure to reduce emissions, to embrace renewable energy, and to demonstrate responsible stewardship for the resources, for the land that they operate on and for the people that they surround and touch as well. So not easy, but incredibly important. And as ever, things that are not easy, but important, they present opportunities, right? For innovation, for leadership, to build resilient, future-proof business models to show how we can do this better, and that's where I think we are in this industry today.  

In this episode, I've got two fantastic people with me to tell the story of Bellevue Gold. We'll tell you a little bit more about the company in just a moment. We'll look at how the company is navigating today's exceptional external environment. Lots of volatility out there, of course. And then we'll dig in on what I think are really ambitious targets at Bellevue Gold and why they've set out this business case for integrating sustainability into their core strategy and the steps they're taking to actually do that. We love to get to the how on this podcast.  

First of all, I have Darren Stralow, who is the CEO of Bellevue Gold. Darren, welcome, please tell us, how did you end up where you are? Not everybody finds themselves in a CEO chair, and I'm sure there's a bit of a journey behind this. 

Darren Stralow  

Thank you very much for the introduction, really excited to talk about Bellevue Gold because we have been doing some exciting things here. My name is Darren Stralow. I'm a local of Perth, Western Australia. I grew up in a place called Fremantle, which is a port city, just out of Perth. For those that don't know Western Australia and Perth, it's a very strong resources focused economy. A lot of employment over here is in the resources sector. It's hard to grow up in Perth and not know about resources. 

I studied mining engineering at the WA School of Mines, which is one of the most prestigious mining universities worldwide, located in Kalgoorlie in the gold fields of Western Australia. Worked in gold mining pretty much my whole career, predominantly focused in the underground mining space and worked for companies big and small, and then took on the role at Bellevue about four years ago to build a project from scratch. Bellevue is a new operating mine. We poured gold pretty much about two years ago on the dot for the first gold bar, and we've been on the journey ever since. 

Mark Lee 

Amazing. What do you still love about it after all these years growing up there, that educational path? What's exciting to you about being in this industry? 

Darren Stralow  

One of the most exciting things about the industry, there's probably two. First is that it truly is an industry where you are creating value from something that sits in situ. So you take rocks that have been around and in place for billions of years. Through the journey of extraction, processing, refining, you're turning it into a useful product that the world needs and the world wants. You're basically creating it from nothing but also creating a lot of jobs.  

The other part of the industry that really gets you out of bed in the morning is the people that you deal with. You get a privileged position where you can deal with everyone, from the operators at the face, through to people in the boardroom, people from all walks of life, all parts of society, all pulling together to get to a common outcome. The people that make up mining are some really unique and fantastic individuals that I really enjoy working with. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, so often it's the people we get to do these things with that create that extra motivation to keep doing it. One of the people I get to do this with is my colleague, Dr. Mary Stewart, who is our lead partner for corporate sustainability and climate change in Australia at ERM. Mary, want to give you a chance to introduce yourself and what you do with ERM and how you ended up here as well. 

Mary Stewart 

Thank you very much, Mark, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation as well. By background, everyone can hear from this accent. I come from South Africa, originally from Johannesburg, and did a degree in chemical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, with a lot of my technical working experience being on the South African gold mines. I've lived in Australia for longer than my accent will suggest, and have spent 20 years with previously Energetics, and then through the transaction with ERM, working now with ERM. I’ve been working with Australia's largest miners with a significant carbon footprint and helping them to understand the risks and opportunities that are presented by actively managing climate change. It's been a busy 20 years. And what keeps me interested in it is that there is so much to do. There is so much at risk, but there is also such enormous opportunities if we just work together, actively address the risk that we can see coming and move forward as an economy. 

Mark Lee 

There is truly so much to do and so much opportunity to learn from how we've done it in the past and do it all the better going forward. As we round out the geographies, people who listen might know I'm sitting in California, but in relation to Perth and Johannesburg, I grew up in British Columbia in Canada. Another outpost of the legacy British Empire and also a very resource intense place. In my case, Darren, a much more forestry kind of town rather than a mining one. But of course, pretty proximate to a lot of that.  

Darren, I don't think we can assume that everybody will know Bellevue. Would love you to tell us a little bit about this company and what's different about it than other miners. 

Darren Stralow  

There's a few unique things about Bellevue, we're one of the newest large scale underground mines, particularly in the Western Australian mining landscape. The mine itself, the deposit was only discovered back in 2017. And because it's in Western Australia and Western Australia is a mining district, it's in a traditional mining area of Western Australia. We were actually able to get the project permitted, built, and pour first gold within six years of the original discovery, which is pretty phenomenal when you think some projects take 20 years to build. 

Mark Lee 

Incredibly fast by normal standards, right? 

Darren Stralow  

Incredibly fast. The reason is, it's a known mining area, but it's also a high-grade resource. As soon as it was discovered, we knew it was going to be a mine and went about putting everything in place to try and build it in the quickest possible scenario. Obviously, the gold price has been relatively strong lately, so it's a nice environment to be building a gold mine in. As I said, Bellevue is an underground mine, the resource grade is about 9 to 10 grams per ton. The reserve grade is just under 5 grams per ton. We've got a 1 million ton per annum processing plant. We've since upgraded that to about 1.3 million ton per annum. We get really good recoveries out of it and built a really good, modern underground mine. But what really makes Bellevue unique compared to other mines is that we announced at the start of August this year that we have got net zero carbon emissions, which is scope one and scope 2 for the first half of calendar year 2025. We're the first gold mine globally to announce net zero gold production, which is something that the team's really excited about. 

Mark Lee 

Congratulations and incredible. I think you arrived there ahead of your own target, right? So again, proving you can really move at speed.  

Mary, I know you and ERM’s team have been working with Bellevue Gold on this journey for some time. Can you tell us a little bit about the partnership from our side? 

Mary Stewart 

We've been working with Bellevue Gold across their ESG journey. We initially worked with them on their NGR and NPI reporting requirements. That's the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme and the National Pollutant Inventory Scheme in Australia, which requires large energy users to disclose their energy and greenhouse consumption. This really gave Bellevue the first concrete look at their emissions profile. We also developed a TCFD-aligned climate-related risk and opportunities register, qualitative scenario analysis alongside that, and that was where Bellevue really started to look at the risks and opportunities and what the future might look like. This demonstrated a really strong opportunity around their green gold offering and started signaling that the signposts around that growing market value. Bellevue, to their credit, saw this as an extraordinary opportunity and has moved forward at speed on that. Currently, we're looking at their scope 3 inventory and who knows, in the broader supply chain, what Bellevue's ambitions might be later down the track. 

Mark Lee 

Mary, how unique is this? Are many of your clients in the region doing TCFD work and setting goals that are this ambitious? Is this on a bleeding edge? Is this on a leading edge? Is this becoming a norm even in the region? 

Mary Stewart 

When Bellevue engaged with the TCFD framework, it definitely was one of the fast movers in the sector. But now, as we're seeing, mandatory climate disclosure has been regulated in Australia. The first report is due in the market before the end of March next year. There is a requirement for a TCFD aligned climate risk and opportunity assessment as part of mandatory disclosures. So, the entire Australian market is going to be the leading edge globally when it comes to just working out what climate risks they're exposed to, what the opportunities are, and telling investors and the broader stakeholder community about that. Where Bellevue has definitely been much more forward thinking than the rest of the market is, while they've understood this, they've also looked at the opportunity and seen the real market value in it to move forward. 

Sustainability as a strategic advantage  

Mark Lee 

Darren, that's a great transition back to you. You could just do what compliance demands and move at the pace of the crowd, but you've been really ambitious, developed the mine fast, you've pursued and achieved these net zero goals fast. What made you and Bellevue Gold's leadership decide to push harder to integrate sustainability into the business model in this way? 

Darren Stralow  

I could probably answer that question for about 20 minutes because there's so many factors that go into it, Mark. It really came down to, because we were building a project in recent years where all the technologies there, all the building blocks have been proven to be viable, and we could do it. We saw the opportunity to do it technically and feasibly and within the economic combines without adding too much extra cost, too much extra complexity to the project. So, to be able to just see those technical parameters could be achieved in a way that didn't add too much risk to the business, putting the opportunity out there. And then when you really stack it up and go, okay, what are the potential tangible benefits from doing it? There’s a lot of them that we have in our wheelhouse for it. For one, it's a competitive environment for everything, for contractors, for employees, for investors, for government support. So how do we, as a new project, make something unique about us that is going to attract the eyes of all those stakeholders. We were trying to build the project quickly. How do we get that government support? How do we get that traditional owner support in a good way? And having that ESG focus was a part of it. It also created some new things like we've investigated and actually achieved selling some of our gold into the market as a premium. So, there's been all these advantages, which is really because we're a first mover in this space that we've been able to do that.  

I guess the fundamental thing that has underlined it all is that it's actually just the right thing to do. And when you think about it, if you have the ability to do it, yes, it adds a bit of complexity. Yes, it adds a bit more capital cost because of the infrastructure that you have to build. But right down to the core of it, it's actually the right thing to do. I think people have seen that and particularly as we built out our workforce. The last couple of years of mining in Western Australia has been a really competitive industry. We've had a lot of commodities that have all been up and about at the same time, a lot of projects coming online and a lot of competition for talent, competition for contractors, competition for resources. We have been able to attract really good project partners, really good employees, and we have a really good culture on site. The positive ESG focus and the net zero target has been a key part of that. 

Mark Lee 

So it sounds like stakeholders of all kinds are maybe impressed and attracted to be part of this. Is some of it generational? We often talk about a younger generation wanting to see evidence of sustainability performance, but is that true across your whole workforce or is that really about the next wave coming in? 

Darren Stralow  

We definitely see it in the workforce. We do have a young and dynamic workforce and you do get a lot of feedback from the next generation coming through. That's one of the reasons that they joined the company. That's one of the reasons that they like working for the company. We built this big renewable energy power station, four big six megawatt wind turbines that sit right across the road from the mine, that are very visible, and having that visible representation of the low carbon emissions and the net zero thing actually picks up your mood when you see them in the morning, when you go to work. The sun happens to just set behind the wind turbines every evening, they're quite impressive structures to build right next to a mine site. It's just surprising to see, the mood when those things are turning, of people on site is actually pretty cool. 

Mark Lee 

It's a pretty dramatic symbol, right? Where I live here, you don't have to drive very far inland to get to these huge expanses of wind turbines, some of which are quite old. So there's some of the original ones that were built, but you just find yourself almost in a forest of them. It's really a statement about power and the changes.  

Mary, I'd love to come back to you. You touched on the shift in the regulatory environment in Australia and gave us a hint of how that's affecting the way people move. But this has been happening fast. It is happening in other places in the world, but Australia is on a front foot on this one. What are you telling clients about where and how to start? 

Mary Stewart 

The first starting point that will set you up for success is to have the conversation about what is my disclosure appetite? What is my appetite to address the risks and opportunities? Get agreements at board level and at exec level around what the aims of this program are. Once you have that North Star, all the complex decisions that you have to take around how am I quantifying scope 3? How broad do I need to go on this? What is my ambition when I'm looking at risk and opportunity? What do I need to be saying about KPIs? The intense detail that is required to address this, there is a lot of subjectivity through the program. So, if you have agreement at the board and at the executive about where you're going, you've got a much better chance of coming out with something that actually helps you manage your company better.  

The other piece of advice that we're giving everyone is, you're taking a lot of decisions, ground truth to them with the auditors now. As soon as you start on your disclosure journey, bring your auditors along with you, because if they disagree with a decision that you take in the first month of developing this thing, and you only find that out 13 months down the track, it's a lot of waste of time for everyone. So, get agreement with your board, and then start getting your auditor on site. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, and in the middle there, Mary, you hit on something that keeps coming up in conversations for me recently about narrative around sustainability, which is it should be better. And when we can prove it's better, the motivation to do this regardless of perceived barriers or obstacles changes.  

I'm going to stick with you for a minute Mary. I want to know how have the new regulations and the environment affected how we work with Bellevue? So back in the context of this conversation, has it reshaped or changed the way we support and partner? 

Mary Stewart 

I think because Bellevue was on the front foot with respect to having a TCFD aligned disclosure and using sensible scenarios within that, so looking at sensible scenarios around what the future business model might look like, it will have set them up very well for their broader mandatory disclosures. But also coming back to what Darren said beforehand, they had an ambition to be a certain type of company. So, they were clear about how they want to address this. It's not only a risk, it's not only something that's going to cost us money. There is opportunity here and significant opportunity. So, once you have that perspective, you are setting yourself up for success and not just for a box sticking exercise or a data gathering exercise, but something where you build useful decision information on the way through and use it to guide your company strategy. 

Mark Lee 

Mary, if I can stick with you for one more before I come back your way, Darren. Darren talked a little bit about the impact on stakeholders of the way Bellevue has done its work. I don't think you mentioned the investor community, Darren, and I might come back to you about them as well. But specifically thinking of that stakeholder with its unique position relative to companies, Mary, how are they responding to the changes in the landscape and what does it do to how they view or what they expect of the mining sector? 

Mary Stewart 

These mandatory climate disclosures are built into the Corporations Act. These mandatory climate disclosures are financial disclosures. The first intended audience for this data is investors. That being the case, what good looks like is going to be determined by the investors. The mining sector is very good at looking like its peers. There are very few mining companies that want to appear to be different. So, as companies are looking at what they should be disclosing, they're trying to work out what their peers are going to disclose.  

What I think we're going to see coming out of the investor group is that they're going to see all of these reports and these reports are about risk. They're reports about opportunity and they're going to see a slight nuance in a disclosure from this company. And then they're going to expect everyone to be able to do that. I think we're going to see something quite different coming out of the contract miners because the contract miners make their profit on the margins. I think we're going to see very different types of opportunities coming from them. The investors are going to see that and ask the mining sector why you're not disclosing that type of information.  

So, are we seeing the mining sector change now? No, because we haven't seen that many public reports yet. I'm looking forward to year three of disclosure because I think that's where we're going to see real uniformity and real decision useful information both on behalf of the investors, but more importantly, on behalf of the companies that are preparing these disclosures. 

Mark Lee 

So a bit of patience perhaps required, but when we get to that point of comparable, highly credible information, it should really enable different decision making. 

Mary Stewart 

It's not just going to be in Australia. Just because the risk isn't isolated to Australia. If an investor knows there's this type of risk associated with this type of asset in this type of environment, just because it's Australian registered, doesn't mean that's why they have that risk. If you're Canadian registered or American registered, chances are you have similar risks. So, while it's mandated here, risk doesn't respect geographical boundaries and jurisdictional boundaries. It's not going to happen overnight, but it absolutely will be a global trend. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, I think these boundaries are in that way porous, right? When people get access to that kind of quality of information in one region, they also start to want it in other ones, it's influential in both ways.  

Darren, I want to move towards refineries, but would love to pause with you on the investor question first as well. How has your conversation with investors evolved? Have they been supportive of the sustainability ambitions of the company or more? Show us, prove it to us that this is the right way to do it. 

Darren Stralow  

It has been a conversation that has evolved over time in that back in 2020/2021, when Bellevue was still looking at doing feasibility studies and looking to build the project, the ESG focus was one of the first things that you talked about in a meeting and one of a really big focus within the industry. You've obviously seen a bit of change in the political landscape in the last few years. You've seen a change in the ESG landscape in the past few years and that conversation, really on the ESG front, is used as more of a filter to investment now rather than a driver of investment. I think I always like to define that when I talk about the investor landscape is that, is positive ESG going to make people pay a premium and be a real driver for that investment dollar? Or is the ESG going to just act as a filter to say, can I or can I not invest in this company? Because it is a sign of risk, right? If you're positive ESG, there's less risk, you're going to be shut down, have price spikes, have disruptions to your operations.  

When you look at a company like Bellevue, who is a Western Australian gold miner, our investor base will typically look at us compared to other Western Australian gold miners. When it comes to that ESG landscape, carbon is just one part of the landscape. So, you have to look into other things like, how do they deal with the community? How do they deal with the government? Are they good environmental stewards? What's their diversity like? I'm on top of the net zero conversation. The whole sort of gamut of options go into it. The investors are still really care on who's making the most money and who they're going to get the most alpha from, like that's what they do. But certainly, we've seen that conversation evolve and I'm sure it will continue to evolve over the next few years. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, I like that language “from focus to filter”. I think I will be stealing and using that in future conversations, but a good way to frame the environment the way I see it right now as well.  

I hinted at refineries, Darren, you also previously mentioned premiums, and I think there might be a connection here that Bellevue made decision to use boutique refineries like ABC instead of some of the larger options. And so why? What difference does that make and how has that helped you get a premium for your gold? 

Darren Stralow  

That also was an aspiration for us when we first started, we are going to add this extra complexity to our business. What's the payoff on the other side in terms of premium? And if we can justify, a Bellevue gold bar as a premium product to someone else, then that is a potential revenue source to offset some of the extra work that we've been doing. We went with ABC Refinery. They've been amazing to work with. They're a very entrepreneurial team; it's a private business. We know the owners of the business really well. We went to them with a proposal - we want to refine our gold, but our vision is that we want to refine it with provenance. We want customers to be able to know that when they're buying a Bellevue gold bar, it is actually a gold bar that is just sourced of gold from the Bellevue mine.  

And then, it'll take a bit of working with them on the other side to, market it in the right way to find the right customers, that are looking for it. We do things like investigating some software which uses blockchain to identify the provenance of pieces of gold that come out, so the customers can tell where it is. But really what our vision was, was that there could be a market for green gold. It's something that we wanted to test, but the thing is, how big is the market going to be? How much the premium is going to be? This is something that we're still discovering going forward.  

So this is where you get that first mover advantage of coming out and saying, we now have a product that's unique in the market, which is net zero gold. It's only a very, very small sliver of the global gold market. So what you're looking for is a customer base that likes premium products and you can walk down any high street in any city around the world and understand that people are willing to pay a bit more for a product that's got a certain label on it. Our view is, why not Bellevue?  

We've worked with a few different end user customers. There is a group out of London called SMO, which stands for Single Mine Origin, which will sell gold to jewelers and to other people that have different characteristics about them. Maybe they've come from mines that have big community development advances in it. When you buy gold from this certain mine, you know you're helping to build hospitals in West Africa. The Bellevue piece of that is, when you buy gold from Bellevue, you know that you're buying from responsibly mined and net zero. As I said, the net zero announcement was only two months ago, so we haven't really had the opportunity to push that narrative properly. That's something that we'll work with SMO, we'll work with ABC, and we'll work with others to see if there's some premium in the market over the next little while, but there's been talk and promises of invites to Fashion Week, and celebrities wearing Bellevue Gold on the red carpet. I'm still waiting for my invite to come in the mail, Mark. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, I think this reveals the real backstory on Bellevue right here. It was all about Fashion Week, we now know, Darren.  

More seriously but finding that hugely amusing as well. You gave us focus and filter, and I was at Climate Week in September in New York, and I heard a lot of talk there about premium versus preference. I hear you saying, this is new, we've only been net zero for a couple months, we're testing. But I think the thrust of the conversation I picked up there was that premium may well be fleeting. That ultimately, if something is a commodity, even if you can give it that provenance, and I hear you've got that unique part, that it might command some premium, but you're hoping to hold on to preference over time, that you stand out enough that if you can make the other stuff equal, then yeah, we'll choose you because you're better, to go back to Mary's word. Do you think the premium's sustainable over time? Is it an entry point, that a way to distinguish the company early? Is it a mix of both? 

Darren Stralow  

Yeah, so it's a mix of both. I think if I came out tomorrow and told you that I got a full offtake agreement for every ounce of gold I produced for the next five years at a 50 percent premium to market, that there'd be a lot of people that are fast followers and trying to get them some of that as well. But look, it's not the case at the moment. The amounts that we've been able to sell have been smaller amounts for unique uses.  

It's not the core of what we do as a business. The core of what we do as a business is mining rocks, turning them into smaller rocks, extracting the gold from them and selling the gold into the market. That is really the core of how we want to make money, how we want to be known. We want to be known as being good across sort of all levels of that sort of value adding chain as it gets in there. As a mining engineer, I want to be good at mining. Like mining is the thing that drives us and gets there and is the core cost center of the business, and therefore the core thing to optimize.  

But if there are some nice things to have on the other end of it that make people feel good and also provide an economic benefit to the company and our shareholders, ultimately the owners of the company, then we'll just continue to pursue it in the background. Again, it doesn't take up a lot of our management time to do it. There are other people out there in the world that have much better contacts and are much smarter and better at doing this than I am. So, we just provide the gold into the market and see where it comes. 

Decarbonizing gold mining: avoid, eliminate, reduce, offset  

Mark Lee 

Now I think in the situation, being really good at mining sounds like an outstanding idea. And if you can then couple it to some of these other attributes, all the better. One of the other things you've already proved you're good at, is decarbonization. You gave us the lead in earlier there that you've just hit these scope one and scope 2 net zero targets. I know this has partly been power purchase agreements with Zenith Energy. So, you've got renewables coming in. As the world really tries to electrify everything to move to a low carbon future. What's been the role of the electricity infrastructure around you in your decarbonization goals? You mentioned the windmills are right there. Is that critical or is it more symbolic? How are you making this work? 

Darren Stralow  

Yeah, so look, there's so much that goes into it. We've had to really focus on it across all levels of the business. As we've designed the mine, done the feasibility studies, built the mine and then looked at the day-to-day operations, we've looked at the carbon emissions as a mitigation hierarchy. The way that we have attacked it is, first we want to avoid as many emissions that we can, in the design stages and say, how can we adjust the way the mine looks and feels and is built? Each feasibility study that was done on the mine actually increased the amount of renewable energy that was going into it.  

The next one was eliminate, so avoid then eliminate. And that was about the things that we needed, like a power station. How do we eliminate the amount of carbon that's coming out of it? So that's when we looked at, initially we had a 40 percent renewable energy power station. Now it's 80 percent, and we're actually achieving a lot more than that at the moment.  

The next one is reduce. The things that we do on site, because we are a mine, we do have a large ramp that goes underground and has to drag a lot of rock from the underground to the surface. There is no economically industrial technology that you can apply to that that's electrified right now. So, we do have combustion vehicles that carry out those sorts of pieces of work. That's our largest emitter on site.  

As a small company in Western Australia, how we did that ourselves was always going to be difficult. So we actually joined a consortium called the Electric Mine Consortium a couple of years ago, and we were quite an active member of that. What that was doing was looking at all sorts of technology and all sorts of things you could do to just reduce emissions on mine. We were quite lucky in that we were building the power station from nothing so we could put in the greatest and the best technology, but there's lots of mines around that built their power stations, 5, 10, 20 years ago, and they're still operating. So, they don't have that, but the companies that run them were looking at all these opportunities to reduce. We would do lots of trials, share lots of data, and look at all the different things that we could do. That was quite an effective piece of us.  

And then there's obviously going to be that tale of hard to abate emissions that we then have to offset. We've been very open that offsetting is a part of the net zero journey. But the way that we have talked about it is that there's carbon neutral, which is just emit whatever the hell you want. And then offset it and say, hey, I'm carbon neutral, but then there's net zero. The difference between net zero is you avoid, eliminate, and reduce the carbon, then you offset the tail and that's how we've come to that now we're net zero statement. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, if people take nothing else from the podcast today, I hope they walk away with that hierarchy stamped in their head, right? That it's avoid first, eliminate next, reduce everything you can, then offset what still remains. The hierarchy just makes sense in so many ways.  

Mary, if I point this to you in a bit more of an industry context, the whole challenge for miners of adapting operations to match their energy intensive processes with renewables when possible, and Darren just said, it's not all possible yet. How do load shaping and energy storage and the various strategies available shape the way you see miners trying to tackle this problem right now? 

Mary Stewart 

I think we're seeing increasingly sophisticated approaches to both how the renewable, the on-site renewables or the grid-scale renewables are managed, and how the site is integrated with the profile. A great example is - broken rock is a battery. It is one of the most efficient ways of storing energy, storing it as broken rock. And particularly at the time of day where we've got renewables flooding the market in Australia and the price of electricity is going negative, you can break rock free of charge. It's not as obvious on off-grid sites, but when energy is for you and energy is readily available, then that's when sites are running their mills at 110 percent.  

But the other side of that is that the sites are not scared to turn the mill off when energy becomes expensive. As I said, my background was the South African gold mining sector. You never interrupted the mill. The mill ran steadily for days on end, whereas now there's much greater understanding of the cost of keeping that mill running and the value in milling at 110 percent when energy is free and turning it off when it isn't. That's probably the most obvious one, but there's a lot of cases where sites are looking at, what are the break points in my circuit? What are the storage points in my circuit? And when do I push the different unit processes to enable me to store energy at different parts of my system? 

Mark Lee 

So really learning how to optimize with the energy that's available and also must be different equipment that is probably more efficient to turn off and turn on, which has sometimes been the obstacle in past, right? Start up and wind down.  

Darren, you mentioned, of course, some things are still running on fossil, and I wonder if that takes us into the territories of fleets and diesel. Mary, you actually said you've been at a conference this week where one of the displays was a massive electric haul vehicle. So that's coming to mining. Darren, is that available to you? Is that one of the places where you're still using a diesel-powered fleet? And how soon can you see that kind of transition happening? 

Darren Stralow  

It's an area that there's been a lot of time and effort and capital put into over the past few years. We're quite unique in underground mining in that we do use these heavy trucks to haul rock from 500 meters underground. There's a mine in Western Australia that hauls ore from 2 kilometers underground to the surface every day. Replacing that with a battery truck, so the way that the battery trucks work is that it would drive up the decline. When the battery is almost exhausted, it would pull into a cutty. It would take that battery out, put a new battery in, go back on the decline and continue on its journey. So that's almost like, you know, your portable hand drill, whipping the battery off and putting it on, but doing that at an industrial scale. That's been looked at and, you know, quite frankly, the technology's not quite there yet. So, it comes down to, does it work? I mean, it's been sort of proven that it could work. The electric trucks potentially go a little bit faster than the diesel trucks, but then you've got the changeout times, which make them a little bit slower. So, what you're really looking for is, you know, a net-net, you don't want to drop in productivity because productivity means cash, means margin, but without adding too much cost and complexity to it.  

And so, the options that we looked at to use, those big trucks and everything in that space, also because the truck moves faster, you can't just change out one truck in a fleet, because if you've just got a bunch of diesel trucks going up, then you put one electric truck that goes faster, that truck can't go faster because your ramp to the surface is a one-way street. So, it would take, on a project like that, where you have 10 plus vehicles in there and a truck costs, a few million dollars, you're talking big CapEx or, I guess technology that's not quite there yet.  

Where the pivot has been in recent days, and this is just ramp haulage, which is what we do in Western Australia. I think in shaft haulage, where a lot of the operations are on level ground and pulling up an electric shaft, they tend to work, so you can get the trucks and you can get the electrification in those applications, but as I said, those applications just aren't common where we do business now. What the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) seem to be doing is they're starting to focus now on hybrid diesel electric. So, you've got your diesel engine, but then you've got the electric drives and everything that come off that, which is a technology that we think will be really viable. While it's not going to cut out 100 percent of the emissions from the underground fleet, it might cut out 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent of them. So, if we can have that win early and have the first few iterations of those vehicles come out early next year. If that works, then that'll probably be a technology bridge for the next 5 to 10 years while we work on the higher capacity batteries and the higher electrification in all those vehicles. That's the way I see the technology chain going in the near future. 

The future of sustainability in mining  

Mark Lee 

Yeah, really interesting from the proof of concept, but not quite there in practicality on the electric side to the huge percentage gains that we might see from the hybrids making a transition technology part of transition planning, if you will.  

We've used up most of our time together, and I want to ask each of you one more question on the way out. Mary, you're going to get first crack. It's that moment where you get to peer into your crystal ball. Whether it's a policy thing that we've talked about already today or technical technological innovation we've already touched. I'm curious which thing, policy, technology, culture, it could be anything you think will have the greatest impact on advancing sustainability in mining in the next couple of years? 

Mary Stewart 

I really think that part of the answer is mandatory disclosure in that companies are required to write down in numbers what the financial implications of a changed natural environment are. The investors are going to be the ones who then provide the level playing field. Darren, I want to see your operating site in five years time and see how you sit relative to your peers. Just what is your operating cost on a dollar per ounce basis? Because everything says that you should be better off. And it's that. Policy is very slow. Carbon pricing is very slow. People spend half their life trying to work out what the policy means before action really starts to happen. From my perspective, it really is about this disclosing what your risks are, what your opportunities are, and letting the investors work out where the money is going to move. 

Mark Lee 

Great and you gave me a fantastic bridge. Darren, if we think about what your operations will look like in five years, what do you hope you will be known for as a company at that point? Let's take it for granted, you're known for being really good at mining. What aspects of your sustainability performance do you hope will stand out in four or five years time? 

Darren Stralow  

Well, I think the unique position that we put ourselves in, through the journey of building a mine and going through all the trials and tribulations of, starting from scratch and ramping up operations and getting things to steady state, is that this sort of has just been bubbling along in the background and producing net zero gold as a unique product into the market was something that was, sort of giggled at and scoffed at a few years ago. But to see some of that, become reality and see some good PR, outcomes and good margin even come from that for the Bellevue Gold product as that first mover. On top of everything else we do, because it all is just part of doing business, would be a really nice thing to see. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, more than nice thing to see, I hope we will all get a chance to witness that. For everyone who's stuck with us today, thank you again for listening in. I've been talking to my colleague, Mary Stewart, who's based in Australia with ERM and with Darren Stralow, who is the CEO of Bellevue Gold in Western Australia. Mary, Darren, it has been a huge pleasure to talk to you. I get to learn stuff every time I conduct these interviews and grateful for having had that opportunity again today.  

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