If you had to rank every machine on Earth by how likely it is to give up diesel, a 345-ton mining excavator would land somewhere near dead last. These things dig around the clock in places the power grid has never visited, and each one drinks about a million liters of fuel a year. That is roughly 264,000 gallons, per digger.<\/p>\n
So it means something that Fortescue, one of the world’s biggest iron ore miners, just ran out of diesel excavators at an entire mine. On purpose.<\/p>\n
The company dropped the news at the end of July, buried in its June quarterly report<\/a>: the excavator fleet at its Flying Fish iron ore mine in Western Australia’s Pilbara is now fully electric. Seven machines, and not one of them burns anything, according to The Driven<\/a>. Across all of Fortescue’s Pilbara sites, 18 electric excavators are now working, out of an eventual fleet of about 70.<\/p>\n Flying Fish sits in Fortescue’s Western Hub, northwest of the mining town of Tom Price and about 22 miles down the road from the company’s Eliwana mine. It is not a demonstration site or a pilot pit. It is a working iron ore mine, and its entire digging fleet now runs on grid power.<\/p>\n These are not battery machines, which is the detail most coverage skips. Each excavator is tethered to Fortescue’s power network through a high-voltage trailing cable, the industrial version of an extension cord. When the company commissioned its first unit at the Cloudbreak mine back in December 2023, it fed the machine through a 6.6 kV substation and more than a mile of cable, with part of the electricity coming from a nearby solar farm.<\/p>\n The economics are the point, and Fortescue’s CEO of metals and operations, Dino Otranto, was blunt about it in the quarterly. “Ongoing volatility in global diesel prices only reinforces the commercial case” for cutting fossil fuels out of the operation, he said. His argument boils down to this: instead of absorbing whatever the fuel market does next, the company would rather stop being a customer.<\/p>\n Fortescue burns about 700 million liters of diesel a year across its operations, roughly 185 million gallons, per The Driven. The company’s stated target is what it calls real zero by 2030: no gas and no diesel anywhere in its Pilbara mining and power operations. Not offset. Not burned somewhere else. Gone.<\/p>\n The machine doing all this is the Liebherr R 9400 E, the electric version of a mining excavator the German equipment dynasty has been selling for years. Per Liebherr’s own spec sheet<\/a>, it weighs 345.5 metric tons in backhoe configuration, a bit over 760,000 pounds, and 353 tons when set up as a face shovel. The bucket swallows 24 cubic meters of rock at a time, about 31.4 cubic yards, and the shovel attachment can push into a rock face with up to 1,545 kilonewtons of crowd force. Call it 347,000 pounds of shove.<\/p>\n The diesel version runs Liebherr’s own D9812, a V12 rated at up to 1,350 kW, around 1,810 horsepower. The E deletes the engine, the fuel tank, and the exhaust, and replaces the lot with an electric drive fed through that cable. Liebherr builds the platform to last more than 60,000 operating hours either way, and offers a powered cable reel so the machine can manage its own cord as it moves around the pit.<\/p>\n One of Fortescue’s units has a stranger origin story than the rest. Oliver Weiss, Liebherr Mining’s executive vice president for R&D, engineering and production, has described how in Australia “we retrofitted an R 9400 diesel excavator produced in 2010 with an electric drivetrain,” turning a 13-year-old diesel machine into an R 9400 E. It was the first time in more than four decades of Liebherr electric excavators that the company converted one mid-life, and the work was done at its Perth branch.<\/p>\n The first factory-fresh unit went to work at Cloudbreak in December 2023 and moved a million tonnes of material in its first three months, running below full capacity while crews learned the machine. Fortescue reported at the time that it was already matching its diesel twin, and beating it on some days.<\/p>\n None of this makes Liebherr unique, to be fair. Komatsu will sell you an electric drive in the biggest excavator it has ever built<\/a>, the 896-ton PC9000. South Korea is testing hydrogen excavators with the fuel tank hidden in the counterweight<\/a>. And cable-fed digging is genuinely old technology: Germany’s 14,196-ton Bagger 293<\/a>, the heaviest machine ever to move on land, has run on external power since the 1990s. What Fortescue did differently is convert an entire mine’s fleet and then keep going.<\/p>\n Every excavator Fortescue unplugs from diesel stops consuming about a million liters of fuel annually. Back in 2024, Otranto put a number on the endgame: decarbonize the full excavator fleet and around 95 million liters of diesel leave the operation every year, along with more than a quarter of a million tonnes of CO2.<\/p>\n The same quarterly report that announced the Flying Fish milestone handed Fortescue its own best argument. Mining costs rose six percent in the June quarter, and the company named higher diesel prices as the main culprit. By its own math, every $10 move in the price of a barrel shifts its cost per tonne of ore by about 20 cents. Spread across 201.3 million tonnes shipped in fiscal 2026, a record and the company’s first year above the 200 million mark, small per-tonne numbers stop being small.<\/p>\n There is also an operational case that has nothing to do with fuel. Electric drives carry fewer moving parts than a V12 and its supporting cast, which is why Liebherr pitches the E version on reduced maintenance and lower noise. An excavator mostly swings, digs, and dumps in a fixed area, so the cable rarely gets in the way. It is close to the ideal use case for grid-powered heavy equipment, and Fortescue’s fleet had moved 100 million tonnes of material on electric power by April.<\/p>\n Digging machines stay put. Haul trucks do not, and that is where this program gets harder. A truck cannot drag a cable across 20 miles of haul road, so the trucks need batteries, and batteries at this scale need chargers that did not exist.<\/p>\n Fortescue built its own. The company is commissioning its first two in-house 6-megawatt fast chargers at Eliwana, the mine up the road from Flying Fish. The Driven reckons they are probably the most powerful vehicle chargers anywhere, and we have covered what a 6 MW plug aimed at a single 240-ton truck looks like<\/a>. About two dozen Tesla Superchargers’ worth of power, pointed at one vehicle.<\/p>\nSeven diggers, zero diesel, and a very long extension cord<\/h2>\n
A 345-ton Liebherr with a cable where the V12 used to be<\/h2>\n
A million liters a year, per digger, is the whole pitch<\/h2>\n
The excavators were the easy part<\/h2>\n