EAS alum is using data to improve mining practices

Hannah Lang ’18 has never been a rock collector and would definitely not refer to herself as a “rock nerd,” (though some of her good friends are). Yet, she graduated from Cornell EAS with a BA in the science of Earth systems and a concentration in geology. “It wasn't the rocks necessarily that drew me to geology,” Lang said. “It was actually the fact that I've always been intrigued by how we get energy and electricity—how we can take pieces of the Earth and from them, basically build up the technology and society that we have today.”

Lang’s underlying interest in those most basic questions has taken her from Cornell to an intermediate stop at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario to earn a Master of Science degree in economic geology with Professor Gema Olivo, and then on to a young Canadian company called MineSense Technologies, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she has worked since 2020.

Lang’s job at MineSense grew out of a conversation she had with the company’s Chief Data Officer, Frank Hoogendoorn, at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s (PDAC) annual convention. “I started going to PDAC when I was still an undergrad at Cornell and continued while I was working on my master’s,” Lang said. “At the March 2020 PDAC I went to a lecture on machine learning and after the lecture I waited around to talk with the presenter, but ended up talking with Frank instead. It was a classic networking kind of situation.”

MineSense installs x-ray fluorescence sensors directly onto mining shovels and other mining equipment to scan and estimate the grade of the material in each load. The company and its technology intrigued Lang, and her conversation with Hoogendoorn led to her starting with MineSense as a geoscience data analyst in June of 2020. “Every time the shovel digs they can get an estimate of how much copper is in that bucket, which completely revolutionizes the way mining is done,” said Lang. “I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”

And four years later, Lang is still “a part of that.” She is now the team lead of digital solutions for MineSense and is even more convinced of the need for innovation in the mining industry. “The mining industry can still be so siloed,” Lang said. “For example, the people whose job it is to send material to the crusher, their key performance indicator is simply how many tons they are sending. They're not necessarily being rewarded for sending high grade material. But the people in the mill—their key performance indicator is how much copper they are extracting. And so there's actually a big disconnect.”

These unaligned incentives within a mining operation can lead to real inefficiencies and MineSense is part of a growing move in the resource sector to do things differently—and better.

Using resources more efficiently has been part of Lang’s approach to life since she was a child. She has clear memories of patrolling her childhood home, looking for lights she could turn off. Her father had offered a trip to the ice cream shop each month that their electricity usage was lower than it had been in that same month the previous year.

Lang also had a journal where she would write ideas for various science projects, many with a focus on clean and efficient energy production. “One of those ideas turned into my eighth-grade science fair project,” Lang said. “It was a floor tile with springs under it so that when you stepped on it, it could generate energy. I was really interested in renewables and how we could do that. I did this experiment to calculate if they were to install this type of tile at the Eric Carl Museum in Amherst, how much energy would it generate for them? I actually just reread my report recently and saw that it was in the neighborhood of one watt per day—so, not really worth pursuing.”

At Cornell, EAS Professor John Thompson helped Lang take her deep interest in energy efficiency and focus it on mining. Thompson was the inaugural Wold Family Professor in Environmental Balance for Human Sustainability and he taught a class that required students to write a paper every few weeks focused on some issue related to mining and the ongoing energy transition. “That course really opened my eyes to how important the mining industry is,” Lang said. “To this day John is still a mentor to me, and he and his wife Ann have been so kind and supportive of me.”

When Lang started at MineSense the company had 60 employees; today there are more than 200. At first, Lang was a geoscience data analyst who helped convert the spectra collected by the sensors into a numerical grade for the clients. She would also work with clients to help them operationalize the data MineSense was giving them. Over time her role has grown so now Lang is the team lead of the digital solutions group at MineSense.

“Through that initial position I realized there's actually so much more that this data could be used for beyond loading and rerouting trucks,” Lang said. “For instance, if the mill knows what grade of material is coming their way they can process it more efficiently. And if they were to use the data to inform a full mine-to-mill strategy there'd be even more potential for improvement.” Lang is excited to see how MineSense and mining firms can work together to make operations more efficient.