Liu Qiang's son is 6. He has visited the coal mine where his father works. Giant trucks roll past all day. He dreams of driving one. His father told him the truth. "I told him my job is to replace truck drivers," Liu said.
Liu oversees what the owner calls intelligent-mine construction at the Yimin open-pit mine in Inner Mongolia. It's China's largest open-pit coal mine. By the end of this year, 300 self-driving electric trucks will be running there. They never clock out. Each load is up to 90 tons of coal. When the battery runs low, a six-minute swap puts in a fresh one and the truck rolls again. There's no cab. A 568 kilowatt-hour battery sits where the driver would. Kilowatt-hours are the unit on your electric bill, and that many would run a typical American home for about three weeks.
Why diesel lost the argument
The Journal's Peter Landers reports two reasons this is happening now. Diesel prices have shot up because of the wars in the Middle East. And battery swaps that take minutes are finally possible at this size. The mine's owner, a unit of state-owned China Huaneng, digs 35 million tons of coal a year. It says the driverless trucks save it nearly $4 million a year. The trucks come from XCMG, with Huawei supplying the software and the computing. A computer program sends each truck to its next load. The pit covers an area equal to 3,500 soccer fields. In a control room, a handful of engineers keep an eye on it all. When a person wanders close, the trucks sound the horn.
China isn't alone. About 90% of Rio Tinto's haul trucks in Western Australia's Pilbara already drive themselves. Few people want those jobs in the minus-40 winters of Inner Mongolia or the 110-degree summers of the Pilbara. Fortescue plans hundreds of battery trucks and says one now costs less to own than a diesel. BHP is going to try a Caterpillar (CAT) setup that tops up the battery while the truck keeps hauling. There are limits. Nobody has proved fast charging works for a whole fleet. Ross McAree, who runs a mining-engineering school in Queensland, did the math for Australia. Taking diesel out of every mine would need 40 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That's nearly 15% of all the power the country uses. And the Yimin site still runs a coal-fired power plant with three big smokestacks.
Our read
This is a Career story first. The driving job didn't move to a cheaper country. It went away, and a smaller number of control-room jobs took its place. That pattern may reach more skilled work than truck driving. The people who do well are the ones who learn to run the system, like Liu. The ones who wait for the system to stall tend to lose. On the money side, Caterpillar (CAT) is held at weight in 10 books; nothing added. High diesel prices speed up electrification, and that pushes demand toward batteries and power. We'd call that a trend to watch, not a reason to chase anything.
Here's the check for this week. Open your 401(k) or pension plan and find the retirement age it assumes. Then ask yourself honestly whether your job will still look the same at that age. If the answer is shaky, the fix is a bigger emergency fund and one skill you can carry into the next version of the job. Liu's son has time to learn the control room. So do you. You pick up the new skill before the old job goes, the way you check for the umbrella before the clouds roll in.