Rio Tinto : Bank of America SmartMine 2.0 Conference

Thank you, Jason for the introduction and for inviting me to present at the conference.

I am speaking to you from Brisbane in Australia. Before I begin I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of Brisbane, the Jagera and Turrbul people, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

As Jason said, I lead Safety, Technical & Projects at Rio Tinto. It's made up of 4 key areas that work together to protect, build and innovate our business globally: Health, Safety, Environment & Security, Communities & Social Performance, capital projects and Group Technical.

Group technical holds our key technical capability across processing, surface and underground mining. Our Bundoora R&D facility in Melbourne also sits within my team.

Before I talk about how we're applying technology to answer some of our ESG challenges, I wanted to recap on a little of our history.

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Rio Tinto has a strong pedigree in innovation and some of the best technical minds in our industry. We have invested in technical capability and technical innovation over the last 50 years, breaking through barriers to deliver step change technologies such as:

AP60 - low energy, low emission smelter technology

AutoHaul - the world's first automated heavy haul rail network that spans more than 1700 kms and services 16 mines

Autonomous trucks - more than a decade of operation in the Pilbara with approx. 260 unmanned trucks in operation today - with a pathway to around two thirds autonomous trucks by end of 2021

Historically we have invested approximately $200m per year on R&D and had over 400 people working on technology and R&D. We expect this to increase in the coming decade to help solve many of our emerging challenges, particularly across ESG.

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Building from the strongest technology foundation in the industry means we're well placed to help the company advance today and deliver against the four priorities our CEO, Jakob Stausholm, recently shared: Best Operator, Impeccable ESG credentials, Excel in Development and Social Licence.

We have a detailed technology roadmap to support these priorities. We're expanding our approach beyond the productivity focus of the last decade - which was largely centred around automation - to also focus on technology and innovation to deliver Health & Safety improvements, address ESG challenges, reduce carbon emissions and drive growth.

Some of the steps we're taking to support success in this next phase include: Developing a Technology and R&D Framework, leveraging best practice to ensure a consistent, rigorous approach.

Recently appointed a Chief Scientist, Nigel Steward, to lead delivery of the roadmap.

Strengthening of existing and developing new partnerships with Universities, technology companies, governments, suppliers and customers

Enhancing existing internal skills and resourcing to be able to deliver the next phase of innovation

I'll now share some examples of the ways we're applying technology in the ESG space, split into Health and Safety, Sustainability and Climate

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Health and safety is at the heart of everything we do.

Technology solutions have already delivered significant improvements in our business. From the use of virtual reality for safety training at the Oyu Tolgoi underground project in Mongolia and at Gudai-Darri in Western Australia; to autonomous trucks, trains and drills in the Pilbara which reduce fatality risk; to the use of drones for high risk inspections.

Beyond this, there is some really exciting work we have underway to address some of our health and safety challenges.

Health:

Many of our operating environments pose risk to our people in terms of fatigue and heat stress - some of our operations see temps of 45 degrees C in the height of summer as well as high levels of humidity. We will be investing in personal monitoring technology to help to manage this risk and will begin with a proof of concept at our Resolution copper project in Arizona.

Safety:

Driving is a critical fatality risk for Rio. We have more than 1500 trucks, graders, loaders and other vehicles in motion each day. Technologies to help eliminate collisions have continually been improving and we are excited to be running a pilot of a proximity detection system with Komatsu at our Brockman mine in the Pilbara with a complementary rollout plan at the Oyu

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