BHP Group unlocks 1 mil mt/y of extra iron ore in Western Australia with AI in Commodity News 08/05/2026 Artificial intelligence helped BHP Group Ltd. unlock an extra 1 million metric tons of iron ore in 2025, Digital Officer Mikko Tepponen said at the Global Resources Innovation Expo in Perth on May 6. BHP, one of the major producers that makes Australia the world’s largest iron ore exporter, had lost about 1,000 hours of crusher downtime, along with additional disruptions at its West Australian ports, over three years before an AI-driven solution implemented in 2025 fixed the problem, Tepponen told the expo. “One of the persistent challenges in our iron ore operations here in Western Australia is the presence of oversized rocks and foreign objects entering the processing system,” Tepponen said. “When this occurs, the impact is actually quite significant” and represented a “clear operational constraint.” “Our response was oversight and foreign object detection — a computer vision solution that uses cameras and machine learning models to actually detect those anomalies in real time, integrated directly into the process control system,” Tepponen added. Computer vision is used at key points along conveyors at BHP’s Western Australia Iron Ore operations to help its teams spot oversized rocks or foreign objects and then remove them before they create safety risks, damage equipment or cause unplanned stoppages. “That one solution is actually delivering to us a little bit under 1 million [metric] tons per annum of uplift potential, which translates then to almost $50 million in value, a 20% reduction in the crusher downtime and up to a 60% reduction in related disruptions,” the BHP officer said. After the technology was implemented in 2025, there have since been no issues caused by oversized or foreign objects, Tepponen told Platts, part of S&P Global Energy, on the sidelines of the expo. Execution over invention However, the most important aspect of the technology’s