The challenge of metals smelting insight
Stakeholders in the metals smelting supply chain face difficult challenges obtaining accurate, timely and reliable information about smelting activity across the globe.
Earth Observation is particularly well suited to global production monitoring. Satellite data can be passed through a series of automated processing steps to detect and measure the characteristic operational fingerprints of individual production sites. This gives stakeholders a reliable, timely source of insight without them having to be technology experts.
Read our use-case on Earth Observation for production monitoring
The Savant service
Savant provides indicators of smelter activities around the globe, in an easy-to-understand format, covering multiple metals and minerals.
Data is collected and analysed using advanced algorithms derived from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques. Data is taken from several different Earth Observation satellites and our global and regional indices are updated daily to give consistent, insightful and dependable results.
The Savant Indices
Two types of indices are provided:
- one to show smelter activity levels
- one to detect periods of shutdown or inactivity.
The data can be broken down to offer more granular detail, including information on the activity of individual smelters.
SAVANT also offers detailed smelter history going back several years, allowing a comparison between empirical data and public announcements relating to smelter shutdown periods.
Global coverage
Earth-I monitors every known, significant copper and nickel smelter globally (95% of global capacity). Those that pass Earth-i’s quality assurance are included in the SAVANT indices (for example, covering 70% of global copper smelting capacity and 85% of Chinese capacity, based on International Copper Study Group figures.)
Space Data transformed by Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence
The satellite data collected goes through a series of automated processing steps to detect and measure the characteristic operational fingerprints of each individual production site. This can vary with factors such as site layout and smelting technology, so each site undergoes characterisation mapping that is constantly updated.
The Inactive capacity index
Our algorithms derive whether characteristic smelting activity is happening at each smelter and aggregates this into global, regional and country Inactive Capacity indices. These determine if activity is taking place.
The dispersion index
The dispersion indices measure how active the smelters are and are calculated by weighting and counting the areas of activity (hotspots) that are derived at each smelter.
An overall picture of smelter activity is thus built into our smelting indices, driven by the activity characteristics of each smelter in the index. Available smelting capacity and activity levels can therefore be derived and studied from a global level down to individual smelters, even in opaque markets such as China.
Coverage
The SAVANT Copper service includes:
- 97% of China capacity
- 88% of Global capacity
- 82% Rest of World (RoW) excluding China
The SAVANT Nickel service includes:
- 98% of China capacity
- 96% of Global capacity
- 95% Rest of World (RoW) excluding China
- 94% of Indonesia capacity
All data is:
- Updated daily
- Analysis ready data back to 2016
- API Access, MS Excel Add-In and CSV download
Read about the Savant R&D Project
The Savant service was born from an R&D project conducted with ESA and Marex Spectron. Find out more.
Download the brochure
For further, more detailed information about the SAVANT service, please download the brochure below
