Opening mines, opening minds: Vale’s Barbara Santana
- 23 July 2025
Barbara Santana believes it is an exciting time to be involved with innovation at Brazil mining major Vale, which has accelerated its investment in technology and innovation over the past five years, and she is also thrilled to be coming to Australia for the first time to attend IMARC in October.
“It will be my first time at IMARC, a great platform for networking and learning about the latest trends in mining technology,” Santana says from Belo Horizonte, where she has been working with Vale as an innovation project manager analyst for just over a year.
“What initially attracted me to the role was the opportunity to work with innovation processes and the opportunity to learn a lot. Vale is so well structured. We are dedicated to using technology to redesign our ways of working through remote operations.
“Today we have some sites that are fully remoted operated due to safety.
“Here in the city centre we have 35 operators doing the earthmoving projects in faraway [tailings] dams.”
Since 2021 Vale has stepped up its use of so-called disruptive technologies in its operations and has been investing in open innovation, expanding exchanges with startups and forming alliances with other miners to tackle key industry challenges. In 2022 it created Vale Ventures, a corporate venture capital initiative that committed US$100 million in capital to invest in pioneering technology startups. It has also created 12 internal innovation hubs it sees as gateways for new ideas to address operational challenges.
“In Innovations for Remote Operations we are a team of seven and in the centre office we are more than 100,” Santana says.
“Our innovation focus includes remote operations, geotechnical investigation, testing new machines and utilising the latest communication technologies and drone surveys.
“So this year we have tripled the number of remote machines in operation, including adding two more sites.
“We have a robot prototype that will do some field investigation by itself so that we won't need to do it with helicopters. We have also tested the MudMaster from the Australian company [Phibion], with nice results.”
Vale describes its innovation hubs as being “like a Vale innovation university developing the skills of the future in business”.
“They [are] a lever of cultural transformation, through hands-on contact of employees with innovation initiatives and channels for transformation in operations, through which strategic initiatives can be implemented,” the company says.
Santana says in her direct experience so far, mainly around tailings dams and the company’s civil capital projects, innovation “can for sure change the way the projects are done” through the use of new generation machines but also adjusted mindsets and business models.
“I truly think the future is not only about machines and technology but also how we train our people to be openminded, with more creative thinking and with energy to solve problems in new ways,” she says.
“Attracting talent, especially young people, to work on our innovation projects is quite nice.
“When we have open spots I see they are quickly taken.”
