Coal, sometimes referred to as "black gold", has been one of the main energy sources for almost every industry worldwide since the 18th century.

Particularly, in China having little oil and gas but plenty of coal, coal has always been considered an essential energy source. To push forward sustainable development, China announced that carbon dioxide emissions would peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality would be achieved before 2060.

Driven by these 2030/2060 goals, coal mining companies in China have been chomping at the bit to accelerate intelligent digital transformation for green mining and high-quality development.

Hongliulin Coal Mine, a subsidiary of Shaanxi Coal and Chemical Industry Group, is a major player in the industry. The coal mine of the company is located in the Maowusu Desert between the Yulin area of Shaanxi Province and the city of Ordos in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. It lies at the core of the Shenfu mining area, one of the eight largest mining areas in the world. Coal extracted here is transported by over 1,500 heavy cargo trucks and 6 dedicated trains to the plants all over the country every day.

In line with the parent group's strategy of tapping into technological innovation and leveraging intelligent coal mining transformation to build a world-class energy group, Hongliulin has been stepping up efforts to spearhead innovative, intelligent, and digital coal mining. They envision becoming a world-class industry-leading coal mining company.

Intelligent Transformation Journey of Hongliulin

Intelligent transformation for coal mining is no easy feat. To stay motivated, Hongliulin set three goals before themselves: intelligent collaboration, underground air quality improvement, and cultivation of a three-dimensional green ecosystem.

To achieve these goals, in February 2021, Hongliulin enlisted the help of the Huawei Coal Mine Team to infuse new-gen ICT technologies, such as network, cloud computing, big data, and AI, into coal mining. They created a plan for intelligent coal mining that would transform their equipment, network, IT infrastructure, intelligent applications, and integrated management. To this end, they have invested in 24 intelligent mining projects or systems, including full 4G/5G and UWB network coverage, industrial ring network upgrade and reconstruction, an F5G video ring network, cyber security protection, a modular data center, cloud computing platform deployment, an integrated management and control platform, an intelligent operation management system, a smart campus, an intelligent fully-mechanized coal mining system, and an intelligent disaster prevention system. Many of these systems have already been put into operation.

Of all the solutions provided by Huawei to Hongliulin, the digital cloud platform running over industrial Internet, powered by Huawei Cloud Stack, was the most essential. In the old days, Hongliulin invested heavily into digital transformation but outcomes were disappointing due to a lack of industrial standards. They deployed lots of systems, but the APIs of the systems were not unified. Plenty of data generated had no unified formats and could not be quickly imported. Data silos made it hard to connect their information systems. The company was plagued by these issues for a long time.

Thankfully, they found Huawei Cloud Stack. The platform has helped Hongliulin unify API standards, break down data silos, consolidate data assets, create digital twins, and achieve intelligent collaboration to pave the way for intelligent mining.

What technologies did Huawei Cloud Stack offer for Hongliulin's turnaround? Huawei Cloud Stack used IoT technology from Huawei Cloud. This technology could be adapted to APIs running over different protocols from different vendors. It could be used in conjunction with 5G, F5G Industry OptiX, and an IP radio access network (IP RAN) based converged industrial network. The flexibility made it possible to connect over 2,600 devices of Hongliulin.

Huawei Cloud Stack used Huawei Cloud's ROMA Connect to import data from over 35 OT production systems and 10+ IT support systems to a unified data lake, and used Huawei Cloud's Fusionlnsight to centrally manage these systems. More than 100 million data records were imported to the lake daily. More than 100 device models and 45 system models were also consolidated. A robust data foundation was provided for integrated management, effective decision-making, and service delivery.

Huawei Cloud's AI-powered Pangu mining model provides intelligent labeling and few-shot learning. It covers over 1,000 mining scenarios, including hauling, extraction, transportation, communication, drainage, and washing. Huawei Cloud Stack harnessed this model to help Hongliulin reduce their development workload by 90%.

Backed by Huawei Cloud Stack, Huawei engineers took four months to identify Hongliulin's devices and import their data into lakes. They helped Hongliulin build the first ever intelligent coal mine based on the industrial Internet architecture in China and develop many intelligent applications such as the integrated management and control platform, intelligent ventilation, intelligent transportation, smart campus, and disaster prevention.

Meaningful Mining Visibility and Improved Safety

The integrated management and control platform of Hongliulin is underpinned by industrial Internet and powered by digital twins. This technology is used to replicate and simulate entire mining processes to predict how the processes will perform through data collection and analytics. It makes the entire system safer and more efficient.

The platform presents Hongliulin's coal field of 138.4 square kilometers on a 3D dashboard. It allows operators to remotely control autonomous machinery from a control room above ground instead of having to labor away in a hazardous underground environment. It gives operators meaningful visibility of the whole mining picture, including how coal is extracted and conveyed to the ground and whether autonomous shearers, crushers, haul trucks, and conveyers are operating as commanded. All operators have to do are a few clicks.

Moreover, the platform allows for autonomous analytics, decision-making, and collaborative control across the mining systems. For example, dispatchers can make remote video and voice calls to surface and underground miners to quickly assign tasks.

Before this digital twins platform was in place, about 100 miners in three rotating shifts were required for busy hours of fully mechanized mining. Now, thanks to real-time monitoring and remote centralized control, over 40% fewer miners are needed, the underground workload has been reduced, and worker safety has been dramatically improved.

More Efficient Underground Mining

Underground coal mining typically goes through exploration, drivage, extraction, and transportation stages.

Traditionally, tasks, issues, and incidents were assigned, reported, and investigated verbally or written down, which was slow and inefficient.

Now, the intelligent operation management system of Hongliulin has digitized coal mining operations on all fronts, including the workforce, machines, materials, methods, environments, and measurements. It provides real-time operational insights and has improved worker safety.

This system allows managers to quickly dispatch tasks to workers online and leverages AI technologies to transform manual inspection of foreign objects at specific time periods to intelligent round-the-clock inspection. As such, it reduces the time a worker typically needs to spend underground by about 2 hours, improving the overall efficiency by 30%.

Hongliulin has been blending the power of innovative technologies with intelligent digital transformation. Working with partners like Huawei Cloud, Hongliulin envisions spurring intelligent digital transformation and reimagining the coal mining industry.