My main point here is that Mills was described as a mining industry insider when his own Bio and presentations makes it clear he is not.
Mills makes a number of statments so I'm unsure what "the same thing is" .. but as far as the two points raised in the GP comment go:
1) Rio Tinto has 'recently' improved throughput using semi autonomous Haulpaks, trains, plants [1] and 'proved' that this works to the order of some ~ 800 million tonne per annum. They also have well advanced plans for a very different type of mining operation for a USD $64 billion copper resource in the US .. should that go ahead.
2) New operations do typically take ten years to bring up to production from (say) exploration drilling to mine opening ... however that's very much the rythm of the domain, relatively steady demand and growth sees forward planners leaving new $360 million capital investments "uncommitted" as long as possible - when the last active resource tails off, a new one is bought online. There's no hard constraint that prevents them bought online faster other than fear of surplus crashing price - typically there are many potential green sites ready to be advanced through further exploration and into economic feasibily technical reports and intial prospectus raising (to meet mine plant costs). [2]
[1] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...