Celebrating 50 years of the International Mining Congress and Exhibition, Turkey

The 26th International Mining Congress and Exhibition of Turkey (IMCET 2019) was held at the Granada Luxury Hotel at Belek, about 40km from Antalya, Turkey, from 16-19 April. MEI was pleased to be invited, as a media partner, to this, the 50th anniversary of the congress.

Although the venue was such a long way from the beautiful historic city of Antalya, this was compensated by the impressive 5-star hotel itself, which was all-inclusive,  so that delegates had free access to all its amenities, including food and drink, during their stay. Considering that the conference was attended by around 900 mining people from over 40 countries, I hope that the hotel appreciated how risky unlimited access to alcohol might be!

Around 50 companies exhibited in the very clean and bright exhibition area, and it was good to see a number of MEI Conference sponsors represented. In the photo below, conference chairman Hakan Benzer introduces Turkish mining officials to representatives from  Flotation '19 and Comminution '20 sponsor FLSmidth.

Derrick Corporation is a Comminution '20 sponsor, and regularly exhibits at the IMCET events, supporting the mining industry for over 20 years in Turkey, with an installed base of over 200 screening machines. Some of the industries include quartz, feldspar, gold, lead, zinc and chrome. Derrick’s fine screens are helping increase grinding efficiency, product specifications and dewatering tailings in Turkey. 

At the Derrick booth

Members of the Global Comminution Collaborative (GCC) visit the Metso booth

The GCC group at the Loesch booth

The conference began Tuesday afternoon with an opening ceremony followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Conference Chairman Prof. Hakan Benzer, of Hacettepe University, on the future of the mining industry and the role of the professional organisations. The panelists were Diana Drinkwater, of the AusIMM and IMPC, Alastair MacFarlane, of the Mandela Mining Precinct, South Africa and SAIMM  President, Jacek Skiba, Secretary General of the World Mining Congress and Ayhan Yuksel, Chairman of the Chamber of Mining Engineers of Turkey.

Alastair MacFarlane, Diana Drinkwater, Hakan Benzer, Ayhan Yuksel and Jacek Skiba

The panel set the scene for the next couple of days, emphasising that mining's future was not just about technical innovation, but adapting to social challenges, licence to operate, reduction in energy and water usage and the impact of climate change. The industry is suffering from a manpower shortage and recruitment and education of young mining professionals will be an important role of the international institutes.

The panel discussion was followed by Welcoming Cocktails and a chance to catch up with some familiar faces.

With 2015 MEI Young Person's Award winner Hakan Dundar

With IMPC representatives Guven Onal (Turkey) and Diana Drinkwater (Australia)

Wednesday was the first full day with many parallel sessions covering all areas of mining and mineral processing and I was pleased to be able to co-chair  a short session on dewatering. There were a number of quite superb plenary sessions, all presented by top-notch men with great experience of the mining industry, its problems and how they might be overcome.

Developing one of the themes of Tuesday's panel discussion, Jeremy Mann an independent consultant, and adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town, looked at the future of mining, which is more than just technological innovation. Mining in the future will not be just about making money, responsibility and sustainability will be priorities. Society depends on our products but the social license to operate is becoming a pivotal component in new mine start up, as is responsible mine closure, and in the aftermath of recent tailings disasters, dry stacking, dry processing and closed water concentrators will become more prevalent. Minimising water and energy consumption will be crucial sustainability components and techniques such as ore sorting will increase in importance, reducing the amount of material which must be processed.

UCT Professors Michael Solomon and Jeremy Mann

Continuing on the theme of social license, Michael Solomon, also an adjunct professor at UCT, presented a very comprehensive plenary looking at economic succession planning, the economy of the mine site after closure and sustainable solutions to mine closure legacy issues. He stressed that it will be necessary to plan infrastructure and land rehabilitation, and diversification into areas such as agriculture, 10 to 15 years ahead of mine closure. In order to do this the mining companies would have to work closely with governments and organised labour.

Malcolm Powell, of Australia's JKMRC is the founding member of the Global Comminution Collaborative, a collaboration between the JKMRC, Sweden's Chalmers University, the University of Cape Town, Germany's Technische Universitat Braunschweig, the University of Rio de Janeiro, and Turkey's Haceteppe University.

Malcolm Powell (right) with fellow GCC members Aubrey Mainza (South Africa), Hakan Dundar (Turkey),
Magnus Evertsson (Sweden) and Marcelo Tavares (Brazil)

In the session on energy, Malcolm presented a fascinating plenary lecture showing how a deep knowledge of the geometallurgy and mineralogy of an ore body can be used to provide integrated prediction of process performance from mine to metal. Such models, which can provide performance evaluations over a range of conditions, could be important tools as aids to securing the social license to operate.

It was an intensive first day of many presentations, but the spectacular gala dinner gave everyone the chance to unwind and enjoy the entertainment provided by the superb Ankara Modern Orkestrasi, encouraging delegates to take to the floor to dance to Western and Turkish popular music.

Alistair Macfarlane

Another full day on Thursday, with more excellent plenaries. Alistair Macfarlane is President of the SAIMM and co-Director of the Mandela Precinct, South Africa, which seeks to rebuild research and development, employment and investment along the entire mining value chain in South Africa via fully collaborative approaches between government, academia, industry and research councils. With the decline of the Chamber of Mines of South Africa in the 1980s the deep gold and platinum mines have suffered enormously. They are very labour intensive and attempts at mechanisation have been resisted by organised unions with the mantra "don't do anything about us without us". The Mandela Precinct was set up in November last year and has led to the South African Mining, Extraction, Research and Development Innovation strategy, which it is hoped will, via collaborative efforts, develop  innovation to benefit not only South Africa, but also other Southern African countries.

 

Marcelo Tavares

Luis Marcelo Tavares of University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil gave an excellent presentation on how computer simulation can be used to better quantify the role of mining and mineral processing in life cycle assessment and the move towards a circular economy. There was a huge increase in demand for minerals after World War 2, and the Club of Rome in 1972 famously and erroneously predicted that "economic development based on continuous increase in extraction of primary mineral resources is not sustainable". Based on this, there should be no minerals now available for exploitation, but the Club of Rome took no account of improvements in technology or the discovery of new deposits. Mining plays a crucial role in world economies, the extraction of natural resources contributing directly or indirectly to more than 45% of the global GDP, but to be fully sustainable Marcelo said that we must have a new era of growth in which developing countries play major roles and reap large benefits.

Irfan Bayraktar I first met in Bursa at the NATO ASI in 1984. He then attended the 1986 ASI in Falmouth, and I had not seen him since.

Bursa 1984: Umit Atalay, Bedri Ipekoglu, BW, Bill Petruk, Gulhan Ozbayoglu, Irfan Bayraktar
and Dr. & Mrs. Martin Parker

With Irfan Bayraktar

Irfan is now retired from his academic position at Hacettepe University, and presented the final plenary of the conference, reviewing flotation technology in Turkey.

Flotation came late to Turkey, the first plant treating copper sulphides in 1950. Now there are 49 flotation plants, treating a wide range of mineral deposits, mainly industrial minerals, Turkey having 70% of world boron reserves. Lead-zinc operations account for 20 plants, one being larger than 5000tpd. Base metal sulphides are numerous in the country, but the throughput of most operations is fairly small.

Of the 49 plants, 32 were designed and built in-house with locally manufactured process equipment. The first was manufactured in 1967, copies of the Denver Sub-A cells. Locally manufactured large cylindrical cells were introduced in 2010, designed using CFD modelling techniques.

The conference ended at midday on Good Friday, and chairman Hakan Benzer thanked the 17 sponsors and the Turkish Mining Chamber and its associated supporters.

This was an excellent event, but any conference of this size has areas open to criticism. Personally I would have liked the coffee breaks to have been much longer, and centred in the exhibition area to give more exposure to the companies exhibiting. The organisers have requested feedback and criticisms via the blog so that they can move forward to the next IMCET in Antalya in 2021.

Many thanks to Prof Benzer and his team for inviting Barbara and me to share the 50th Anniversary of IMCET. It has been a great week and we hope to be back in Antalya in two years time.

Twitter @barrywills