Briefing
North American mine electrification, in brief.
A short, sourced read on where electric and autonomous mining actually stands in North America, and why the hard part is not the vehicle. Every figure here also appears on the STOPES homepage.
Where it is happening
North America, and Canada in particular, leads the world in underground battery-electric adoption. As of 2024, more than 214 of roughly 270 battery-electric vehicles working in underground mines worldwide were in North America. This is the leading market on earth for underground electrification.
These are producing operations, not pilots. Borden in Ontario was Canada's first all-electric underground gold mine and has run on battery-electric machines since 2019. Macassa, also in Ontario, has moved most of its underground production fleet to battery power. Lamaque in Quebec and Brucejack in British Columbia run battery-electric haul fleets, and Onaping Depth outside Sudbury is being brought into production as an all-electric mine. The budgets exist now and the deployments are underway.
The hard part is not the vehicle
Buying a battery-electric machine is a purchase. Making a mine run on it is a transformation. The difficulty lives in everything around the vehicle: charging infrastructure, power distribution, ventilation that changes once the diesel heat and fumes are gone, battery safety and thermal-runaway monitoring, and compatibility between systems that no two vendors build alike. Today, most sites run that transformation alone.
The barrier: certification and channel
A great deal of the technology a North American mine needs is already proven, in Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. It reaches these sites slowly for two reasons. First, certification: equipment still has to clear MSHA in the United States, CSA in Canada, and IECEx where explosive atmospheres apply. Second, channel: most overseas makers have no local distribution, no support base, and no read on how conservative this market is. The technology crosses the ocean easily. The trust does not.
The arc: diesel to electric to autonomous to optimized
Electrification is not the destination; it is the first move in a longer operating-system shift. Collision avoidance and proximity detection, already the fastest-moving safety buy in mining, are the leading edge of autonomy. Monitoring and orchestration are the awareness layer a machine-run operation depends on. A mine electrifies once, but it automates in stages, and the optimization never finishes. The sites that move early run ahead of the ones that wait.
The role of a neutral channel
A mine modernizes once, with no playbook. A channel that works across many mines compounds what each one learns. That is where STOPES sits: a brand-neutral route that tracks what is already proven across the field and sources it to fit a mine's fleet, site, and stage, through one accountable counterparty. Not one maker's catalog, and not held inventory. The right proven system, sourced on demand and placed on site.