Early-stage water management embedded in mine design, rather than retrofitted later, is being pushed by Marnus Koorts, Director of Capital and Process at Weir, as a core variable alongside throughput and grind size. Koorts argues that integrating water balances, tailings deposition plans and pump/sump layouts from concept study stage cuts risk of flooding, unplanned dewatering and costly rework. For engineers, this means specifying pipelines, thickeners and water-recovery circuits in initial flowsheets, not as bolt-ons once pit expansion or TSF instability exposes gaps.

Record metals and mining returns entering 2026 are being driven largely by gold, with sector-wide market capitalisation at an all-time high and balance sheets among the strongest in a decade, McKinsey’s Global Materials Perspective 2026 reports. Behind the headline numbers, overall industry productivity has stalled and value creation is increasingly concentrated in a small group of top-quartile performers. For operators, this points to growing pressure to extract more value from existing assets through operational excellence, brownfield debottlenecking and disciplined capital allocation rather than volume-led growth.

Bergbau has launched its Planning Agent, an AI-driven mine planning tool that converts plain-language instructions into mine designs, production schedules and reports. In a training demonstration, the system processed a full study from block model through optimisation, pit or stope design, sequencing and resource-constrained scheduling to final reporting in about one working day. For planners, this points to rapid iteration on scenarios and reduced manual hand-offs between traditional packages, while still relying on engineers to validate geotechnical, haulage and processing assumptions.