Electric Mining Equipment

Finding

Mining electrifies from the bottom up: battery loaders and trucks are standard equipment underground, Chinese wide-body trucks run in swap-station fleets on the surface, and ultra-class haul trucks - the last diesel stronghold - are being attacked with megawatt chargers, trolley lines and charging on the move

Fortescue's first battery T 264 (the Roadrunner, 240 tons, 1.4 MWh) is testing at Christmas Creek in the Pilbara and is due in operation by the end of 2026, charged by an in-house 6 MW charger in about 30 minutes; it is the lead unit of a US$2.8 billion deal with Liebherr for about 475 machines. BHP and Rio Tinto launched a trial of two Cat 793 XE Early Learner battery trucks at BHP's Jimblebar mine in June 2026 - two of seven being tested worldwide - with static charging now and dynamic charging next.

Underground is settled. Diesel exhaust in a decline has to be diluted with ventilation air, and fans and air cooling are among a deep mine's largest power loads, so battery machines pay back on ventilation as well as fuel. Epiroc's Scooptram and Minetruck Battery machines and Sandvik's LH518B loader and TH550B truck swap packs in minutes - Sandvik's AutoSwap needs no overhead crane - and Caterpillar's R1700 XE, MacLean and Normet fill out the fleet with loaders, bolters and service vehicles. Newmont's Borden mine in Ontario was designed as an all-electric underground mine. Drills such as the Sandvik DD422iE and Epiroc Boomer M2 Battery tram on battery and drill on mains power.

China's surface fleets are the largest. Wide-body trucks - 60- to 90-ton rigid dump trucks built on truck components for short hauls in coal and aggregate mines - are where battery swapping took hold: XCMG, SANY, Yutong, Tonly and Breton sell battery versions, and Yutong reports more than 31 million km on its battery mining trucks. Since May 2025 the Huaneng Yimin open-pit coal mine has run 100 autonomous electric trucks carrying up to 90 tons a trip on 564 kWh LFP packs swapped in under six minutes. SANY's SKT145Ei is sold driverless; Zoomlion's 300-ton ZTE520 is a diesel-electric hybrid with battery; Inner Mongolia North Hauler builds the NTE240AT electric rigid truck.

Ultra-class trucks show why mining keeps hybrids and trolleys in the list. These trucks already have electric drive, fed by a diesel generator. Trolley lines on loaded ramps let the drive run from the grid where it uses the most energy (Cat 795 AC at Boliden's Aitik copper mine), Komatsu's power-agnostic 930E is designed to take battery or fuel-cell modules, Hitachi and ABB are testing a battery EH4000AC-3 on trolley charging at First Quantum's Kansanshi mine in Zambia, and Anglo American's nuGen 790E runs on hydrogen from an on-site solar-powered electrolyzer at Mogalakwena. Cable-electric rope shovels and draglines have worked on grid power for decades and are not listed. Autonomy is most mature here: Cat MineStar Command and Komatsu FrontRunner haul fleets run driverless in Australia, the Americas and China.

Underground

Underground electric machines

Loaders (LHDs), trucks, drills and service vehicles.

Surface

Surface haul trucks and wide-body trucks

Battery-electric first, then hydrogen fuel-cell and trolley or diesel-electric hybrids.

Adoption ladder

Mining machines by electrification stage

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