Century of Gold: Newmont's Role in Shaping the Future of Mining

Dean Gehring, former Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Newmont, explores Newmont’s century-long influence on the mining industry and its role in shaping the future of gold and copper.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast.

0:03

We sit down with experts, world changing innovators, creators and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts and more.

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And now this week's episode in today's episode of the Tomorrow's World Today podcast, George Davison, host of Tomorrow's World Today on science interviews, Dean Goring at the time of recording, Dean was the executive vice president and chief technical officer of Newmont.

0:36

The world's largest gold mining company.

0:38

Dean provides valuable insights into Newmont's century long journey, its emphasis on gold and copper mining and the crucial role these metals play in modern technology.

0:46

Now, here's George.

0:46

Thank you for coming in and talking with us today, George.

0:49

Thanks for having me.

0:50

It's a pleasure to be here.

0:51

Let's talk a little bit about what this company that you work with does.

0:56

If you'd share that with us, why is this work important to the world?

1:00

Well, Newmont's been around for over 100 years and our primary focus is on gold mining, but we've been moving consistently more into copper mining as well.

1:09

So now we're producing both gold and copper.

1:12

Both of those elements are very important for the future of the world, what we need today and to support technology.

1:18

I think most of our audience would think of gold as you know, like maybe a gold watch or something along that line.

1:25

How is gold also used, let's say in the industrial world?

1:28

Sure, there's a number of uses for gold in the industrial space and in particular technology.

1:34

So while silver might be the best conducting metal, gold is better actually for high end electronics because it doesn't tarnish, it doesn't rust or oxidize.

1:41

So if you need to put gold into a position where you can use it for technology that's required to last a long time, like in pacemakers or in satellites, that's the metal you'll go to.

1:51

So it's not just something that looks shiny and pretty.

1:54

This is a very important metal that needs to be found anywhere.

1:58

We have to find it.

1:59

We mine it right and try to get it out of there.

2:01

And what most people don't know is you, you have about $2 worth of gold in your smartphone.

2:06

Is that right?

2:07

And how much do we have to go through?

2:09

How much soil or ground do we need to go through to find, let's say the amount of gold we would have in our iphone at Newmont, our average gold grade is about 1 g of gold per ton of ore.

2:22

So to get an ounce of gold, you need to mine 32 tons of ore to get that one ounce of gold.

2:29

If you were to take your smartphone and take the battery out and collect enough smartphones to equal a ton of smartphones, you would actually have 10 ounces of gold in a ton of smartphones.

2:39

So a ton of smartphones is 300 times more gold than what we have in our gold ore.

2:46

So that tells you how much it gets concentrated and used in final products.

2:49

So it's a lot of effort to capture that gold, recover it and use it in the final end product.

2:54

Well, thank you for that.

2:55

And now I think there's, you know, a bigger broader understanding for the audience.

2:59

So is Newmont a small company, I mean, how many employees are we talking here?

3:03

So we are the largest gold mining company in the world and we have over 20,000 employees in our company today.

3:11

We're headquartered out of Denver, Colorado.

3:13

Initially, we were based out of New York and then over time, we've moved to Denver, Colorado and we're talking a sales volume of how much a year on average our our market capitalization is right at about $40 billion today.

3:27

Billion.

3:28

So I'm sure it wasn't always a $40 billion business over the last, what did you say?

3:33

100 years?

3:34

100 and two years.

3:34

Yes.

3:35

So can we go back in time?

3:37

And let's go back to the pioneering moment.

3:40

Somebody started this company and it was what a company of one at one time.

3:44

Right.

3:45

Yeah, the original founder of the company was Colonel William Boyce Thompson.

3:51

And he had a business where he was looking into minerals and oil and gas.

3:55

And so this was a company where he had, was collecting those types of operations.

3:59

And then over time, Newmont continued to focus more just in the gold mining sector.

4:03

And it really got his big springboard after it developed some mines in Nevada in the Carlin trend.

4:10

Interesting.

4:11

So he was a bit of an explorer, maybe a bit of a prospector out there doing that kind of work that as well as probably just more of a business entrepreneur.

4:20

I think he could see the future in terms of how this business was going to form and what gold mining could look like in North America.

4:25

That's wonderful.

4:27

I, I really enjoy learning about how things get started.

4:30

Somebody had to go out there and take some risks and, and that's ok, you know, take some chances and do the hard work and maybe it'll turn into something special.

4:40

Mining is absolutely that way.

4:41

And I think when most people think about mining, they also think about the exploration part of it and there's a huge amount of risk on the front end.

4:48

It's not very often that an exploration effort will actually result in a mine.

4:53

it, the, the chances are actually quite low and so to grow into the size of the company we have has taken a lot of tremendous amount of effort over the 100 years.

5:01

And there was also a risk that had to be taken along the way.

5:03

Absolutely.

5:04

So let's talk about your position.

5:06

You know, can you run us up to speed on what do you do for the company?

5:10

So my title is Chief Technology Officer and I think I have the best job of the company.

5:15

I really do.

5:16

I, I get to work with some of the brightest, most talented, hard working people in the world.

5:22

I'm often very humbled by how smart the people are that work in my team.

5:27

It actually causes me to raise my game.

5:29

I feel like I need to try to keep up with, with people.

5:31

We look after supporting all of the technology needs for Newmont.

5:36

So you are where you are today, you're enjoying the work you're doing.

5:40

And can we chat about before Newmont?

5:43

What, what was that like?

5:45

Like, well, I've worked for a number of different mining companies but if I, if I go back to even when and how I started, I grew up on a very small farm in northern Idaho, my graduating class in high school had 56 kids.

5:58

And so I knew that I always wanted to be an engineer.

6:00

But I had to really think about how I could get there.

6:03

And the story for me is, is that being the oldest of four kids growing up on a farm, my parents had limited ability to support what I could do to go to school.

6:10

So I had to be very creative in terms of what could I do for scholarships and how could I find a way to help fund that?

6:16

The University of Idaho had a mining scholarship at the time there was a full ride scholarship.

6:20

So I thought, well, I'll take mining engineering for two years and then switch to become a mechanical engineer.

6:25

What I ended up doing is I started enjoying the classes.

6:28

and a is a that I had, that was a good mentor for me.

6:31

Said, why don't you go work in an underground mine?

6:33

So I went to work in an underground silver mine as a miner.

6:36

I loved it.

6:37

Absolutely loved it.

6:39

And that's what sparked the interest for me.

6:40

And here I am today 33 years later, that sounds like really good advice.

6:44

You know, you might think that this is where you wanna get.

6:47

But knowing the most basic job that makes the actual physical service or product happen, it's so critical to know that information.

6:57

So you're not just academically intelligent, you are actually working in the field right at the front of it and you're able to see that world.

7:05

That's so critically important.

7:07

I've seen that a lot in my career.

7:08

Oh, absolutely.

7:09

And, and I've been very fortunate in my career to have the, had the opportunity to work with people all the way from, you know, the, the mining face clear through the executive and board organization and you can never forget the people that do the hard work that make the company what it is.

7:26

Yes, it's beautiful.

7:27

The way you said that you mentioned a moment ago about you knew you wanted to be an engineer.

7:32

What kind of went through your mind?

7:35

That said, I think I wanna be an engineer.

7:37

I mean, what was an engineer in your mind when you were a young person?

7:42

Like how did you think about that?

7:43

What I, I like math or I like putting up the farm fences and figuring out the engineering on how to get that.

7:50

I mean, how did you get through the thinking to say?

7:52

I think I wanna be an engineer.

7:54

Yeah.

7:54

You know, if I go back to the, the reference about school and classes, I generally was ok with school but I didn't necessarily like math.

8:02

I mean, I was interested in a certain aspects of it but it wasn't necessarily the technical part of schooling that made me want to do it.

8:07

I was always interested in how things worked.

8:09

I just couldn't turn my mind off on what causes that to happen.

8:13

And my poor parents, the things they had to put up with, be taking things apart and not being able to sort of put them back together.

8:18

, the numbers of times I sorted out circuitry in our house because I was trying to play with electronics.

8:23

I shouldn't have been playing with.

8:24

, I just, I couldn't help myself from stop thinking about how things work and how you can make things better.

8:31

That's great.

8:32

Yeah, we have somebody that we've worked with for a long time and every Friday was his day to take things apart with the kids.

8:40

And those kids, kids are so smart today.

8:42

You know, they've all, they've grown up and they just have a love of engineering and it all started with how does it work and take it apart and, and I think what was important for me in that too is that, you know, I had parents that were willing to let me make mistakes along the way.

8:58

I had, you know, mentors that were willing to let me stretch myself and make mistakes and learn from that.

9:04

And then how do I improve?

9:06

Did you have mentors when you were growing up?

9:08

And who were they?

9:09

And could you chat on that a little?

9:12

Yeah.

9:12

I think one of the first big influences on my life and I didn't realize it until I started reflecting back as an adult, was actually a high school teacher that I had.

9:20

And again in this small school, he taught debate, math, economics and history.

9:26

And the thing that he instilled in me, not just me, but the, the kids time from the small school was don't feel that you're limited because you've come from a small farming community in Idaho, you can do whatever you want and you can compete with anybody in the world.

9:42

And so it just gave us a sense of confidence to go try something.

9:46

Don't hold yourself back.

9:48

That's great advice.

9:49

Yeah, I mean, people who are in our youth that put that wind under our wing, so to speak, if you start to really buy into that, you can really do some good things in this world.

10:00

We're not real, we're not real fond of the people who don't believe in others.

10:04

So we're a, we're a build people up kind of, you know, group.

10:08

So it's nice that you got that good advice.

10:11

So if you were back in high school and you could do one thing over again.

10:17

Let's just say it was something that you wish you didn't do or maybe you stumbled.

10:22

If you could go back in time and look at yourself at that moment, what would you say to yourself?

10:27

Well, it's interesting.

10:28

It's gonna sound a bit counter to what I just said because I did feel that I had a lot of confidence, but I recognized as an adult.

10:34

There were still times when I was holding myself back that I thought, oh, you're still this small farm kid from Idaho, you know, know your place.

10:42

And as I continue to grow in my career and push through some of those boundaries, I recognize that I've been able to get much, much further in my career than I ever could have imagined earlier.

10:51

So I would have told my early self push even a little bit harder, even though you have some confidence you can do even more than that.

10:58

So you pushed, you were comfortable pushing yourself about mom and dad.

11:01

Did.

11:01

They help to push along a little too or no, they didn't.

11:05

But they, they provided the space to allow me to do that and the support that's great.

11:10

Everybody needs that little bit of space.

11:12

My mom was very instrumental in helping me.

11:15

She was very positive with my upbringing and told me no, you can, you can do that.

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And I think where I was very blessed is my parents instilled in me just, just the value of hard work and just some basic values of how do you treat people and how do you show up in the world?

11:32

And, and that's what I really took from them, you know, in addition to just go for it, if you wanna push yourself, go for it.

11:38

But I never felt that they put pressure on me.

11:40

That's great.

11:42

Wonderful to have good parents, right?

11:44

All right.

11:45

So let's chat a little more about Newmont if you wouldn't mind.

11:48

Can you tell me something that you or the Newmont organization tried to do that failed completely.

11:55

And what was done in response to the failure?

11:59

You know, what's interesting about the mining industry?

12:01

And I've been in it for over 30 years.

12:04

It's not often you have just a total abject failure.

12:07

And what I mean by that, a lot of what we do comes in the form of projects.

12:11

We need to build something to do something and we always find a way to make it work.

12:15

Just the tenacity that we have as an industry, we will continue to work through the problems.

12:20

Now, that doesn't mean that a project doesn't come in over budget or beyond schedule, but we would tend to look back on it and say, but we still found a way to make it succeed.

12:29

Now, having said that our industry is also heavily reliant on people doing work.

12:35

So as I've come up and have had different operational roles, a big focus of mine has been on safety and any time that I've had somebody that was hurt, that was part of my accountability.

12:45

I always saw that as a failure and I would always look at what can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again?

12:50

That's wonderful.

12:51

Yeah, we've, we had that challenge in our business as well.

12:54

We make a lot of things and people in a, you know, working on, in machinery all day long and when we were a younger company.

13:02

We had some people get hurt and,, it took a couple of years but after that we took every single, we replaced every single machine that, you know, the technology and what that could be brought in to try and eliminate injury.

13:16

And,, now we've, we don't have that problem anymore.

13:19

It, exactly.

13:20

It takes that sort of focus and that commitment.

13:22

And I think when you look at it from a personal standpoint that it's a, it's a person that's being, being hurt in this, in whatever may have happened.

13:29

And as I look at our company and our industry, our safety record today far exceeds the construction industry or the logging industry or many other types of heavy industry.

13:39

Yeah, that's great.

13:40

It's good to have that as a, a goal to hit, right.

13:42

, let's see here in a company or, or on a team, people often have many ideas for ways to improve something or solve a problem.

13:51

How do you or Newmont select and prioritize which ideas to pursue and which ones to leave on the back burner?

13:58

And how does that interact with the team?

14:00

Sure.

14:01

And that's actually a big challenge for me in my current role.

14:05

And it's a good problem to have.

14:07

The challenge is I have so many smart people that are natural problem solvers.

14:12

They're, they're always looking for ways to make improvements that we have more solutions and initiatives than we can actually do, which again is a good problem to have.

14:23

But what that requires is that you're, you're disciplined and thoughtful and think about what do we need to do to prioritize the right things.

14:30

And really what it comes back to is what does the business need?

14:33

Sometimes it's fun chasing a bright shiny object where you think this will be a fun project to do.

14:39

But if it's not what the business needs, those are typically the the projects where you find that they struggle or fail.

14:45

So it's about prioritizing the right projects.

14:48

And so do you have a way of identifying needs or utilizing human observational skills to, you know, let's go identify what the next challenges are gonna be that could be meaningful to the organization.

15:02

This is actually, I think a very exciting area that I've seen develop within our company over the last three years that typically what you would do is use those just your observation and your judgment to help determine what does the business need.

15:14

You might do some things like look at bottlenecks, you know what bottlenecks do we need to remove out of our processes.

15:19

So we have while we still do that, what we also do today is we use data so much more to help us understand what's happening in the business.

15:27

Where are those true constraints?

15:29

And a big part of our job is eliminating bottlenecks and constraints, making things flow smoother making it easier to do the work and that's what helps us prioritize what we should be doing.

15:38

Yeah.

15:39

I'm curious now that you're, you know, I'm starting to hear how you're approaching that.

15:44

Do you study other industries and observe how they do things maybe more efficiently if you can identify those, do you try to import those into your organization?

15:55

Yeah, absolutely.

15:56

, two examples would be,, there are many things within the oil and gas industry where they have done such a great job of standardizing their work that, that we, we'd look to see how can we replicate that.

16:07

Aviation industry is another example of where we look at the maintenance practices and the maintenance planning that's happening there.

16:13

, as well as the actual monitoring in real time, things like jet engines as they're flying.

16:19

So we apply that same sort of idea to how we monitor our important pieces of equipment.

16:24

That's really good.

16:25

Yeah, they've worked pretty hard on safety and absolutely maintenance issues, haven't they?

16:30

So, yeah, we try not to re invent the wheel if we can.

16:33

So let, how about teamwork?

16:35

How important is that at your organization?

16:37

If you look at what it takes to bring to go discover an ore body, do all of the, the mathematical modeling, you need to understand it and then doing the engineering to design it and then doing the operations to extract it and recover it and bring it to market.

16:53

It's a huge effort in multiple functions that need to come together to make that happen.

16:59

There's no one person or one group that can make that happen.

17:02

So just the way that this work is integrated requires that people work together as a team.

17:07

If you don't, you're, you're sub optimal every time.

17:10

OK.

17:11

So how a team works together is really important.

17:15

Absolutely good communication skills, conflict resolution, right?

17:20

What about the, the area of I wanna take it this this way and you wanna take it that way.

17:27

So how do you deal with the, you know, idea sharing and conflict to try and have an outcome at the end that's meaningful?

17:36

Yeah.

17:36

And as I think back in my career, I, I recognize I can find times where I didn't do that.

17:41

Well, as an engineer, I maybe had a very specific and strict view of what I wanted to try to accomplish and what I've learned is you need to understand the other person's position.

17:50

It's not about trying to make your argument first.

17:54

It's understand why do you feel the way you do help me understand why you think that's a priority?

17:59

And typically when you approach the conflict from that position, you, you quickly get to the root cause and it's much easier to find a solution.

18:07

I think that's some pretty good advice.

18:08

Thank you for that.

18:10

All right.

18:10

So let's see, visual communication, the ability to communicate an idea to others at Newmont.

18:18

Is there a specific way that maybe you get your thoughts or whatever you're thinking is a solution.

18:25

I mean, we do have verbal skills, we have sketching skills.

18:30

What are some of the methods that you might use?

18:33

One of the things that I've seen within our company and within the industry is often times you'll have something that, that's quite complex and you need to try to communicate that to somebody that doesn't have the same level of knowledge or understanding that you do.

18:46

And I found that finding visual ways to do that is often very helpful and taking the time to think through how can I help somebody understand this?

18:54

We work with huge databases, three dimensional block models.

18:59

And we've gone as far as actually using virtual reality to help people see things so they can understand what we're talking about.

19:07

And it, it rapidly accelerates their ability to learn and understand what the issues are.

19:12

That's, that's a great way to do it.

19:15

All right.

19:15

How about how important would you say marketing and storytelling are for what we do?

19:22

I, I, I I would say it is important.

19:24

OK.

19:24

But there's multiple levels where it's important.

19:27

I mean, obviously we have shareholders in the company and they need to understand what we're trying to do.

19:32

But we also have employees in the company that need to understand what do we, what's the, what's the North Star, what's our overall objective, how, what are we trying to accomplish?

19:42

And so there's internal marketing and storytelling to help people understand, how do we make sure we're all rowing in the same direction?

19:50

Right.

19:50

Yeah.

19:50

And trying to get everybody to, sometimes issues are pretty complex and it can be very challenging, making a story fit for a broad audience because if they're all engineers and it's a complex little device, I think that's,, you know, we're, we're all in the same space.

20:07

However, you know, if I have somebody that's only, let's just say,, you know, doesn't have that skill set in any way, then finding relatable stories might be help.

20:19

That's how we, we play around in that space.

20:21

And that's something I wish I would have learned much earlier in my career that we don't all think the same people process information differently and you didn't understand where they're coming from.

20:30

So you can understand how to present the information in a way that's digestible to them.

20:35

Exactly.

20:37

And that's not easy.

20:38

It's, it's not, it takes time and practice.

20:40

, to me though, I think it's one of the most exciting things for me is when I see that is when I have a complex issue that I'm communicating and I can see that the people I'm talking to, they get it and it changes the way they look at the world to me.

20:53

That's a huge win.

20:54

It's a huge win and maybe now they're a a more motivated person on the team.

21:00

Absolutely.

21:01

Get it.

21:01

I know why we're doing this bingo.

21:04

So why don't we wrap the interview today with a little discussion about the future?

21:09

I mean, we are tomorrow's world today.

21:11

So I if we're looking at where we are now and, and we're looking at the gold industry, the metals industry that you're involved with.

21:22

What should we like, anticipate seeing from your organization or the industry as a whole?

21:28

So that the young people out there, if they're looking at joining the workforce someday in the future, how can they think where they are now and say, well, the industry is going there, maybe I should go in that direction.

21:43

Yeah, that, that's a good question.

21:44

And I think it's important to understand the backdrop that gold mining has been around for over 5000 years.

21:49

But we've seen a huge change in technology.

21:53

You could argue in the last 100 but in particular, in the last 20 it's just accelerating exponentially.

21:59

What I think is gonna be.

22:00

The next big innovation is as we continue to look at, what can we do to electrify our mobile equipment fleet, so we can reduce our carbon footprint, which is very important to Nuon.

22:10

But to accomplish that it's gonna require a high degree of ization and because it, it'll take autonomous vehicles to be able to work within that sort of ecosystem or that sort of environment to make that successful.

22:21

I think that's the big innovation we're gonna see next.

22:24

The mining industry is heavily technology dependent and we need people with technology degrees and we are continuing to find more and more need for that in a vast array of disciplines.

22:38

Well, you heard it right from Dean and he knows all about this stuff.

22:42

So Dean, thanks for coming in today.

22:44

Thanks for having me.

22:45

It's been a pleasure.

22:46

Well, everybody, that's another edition of Tomorrow's World Today.

22:49

Thanks for tuning in.

22:50

Bye.

22:52

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22:57

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