Memories of CSMA

We had a very pleasant lunch at Falmouth's Star & Garter pub today with Nick and Pauline Clarke.

Many of you will remember Nick from the mid-90s, when he was Director of Camborne School of Mines Associates (CSMA), which ran the early Minerals Engineering conferences in collaboration with the fledgling MEI, before MEI took over in 1999. Nick attended a few of the conferences, Minerals Engineering '96 in Brisbane, Complex Ores '97 in Bulawayo and Minerals Engineering '98 in Edinburgh.

With Nick Clarke in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 1997

Nick (right) with Minerals Engineering '98 delegates at St. Andrew's Golf Club

It was good to be able to congratulate Nick on his award of CEO of the year, made earlier in the month  at the Mining Journal's Mines and Money Gala Dinner in London (photo left). Since becoming CEO of Central Asia Metals in 2009, he has overseen his company’s transition from explorer to producer, bringing the company’s flagship Kounrad copper mine into production in Kazakhstan in 2012.

Central Asia Metals (CAML) is the 60% owner and operator of a 10,000 t/year solvent extraction- electrowinning (SX-EW) copper recovery plant at the Kounrad mine site. This facility recovers copper from waste dumps that originate from the Kounrad open-pit copper mine, and is located near the city of Balkhash in central Kazakhstan. Sitting on the surface, the dumps accumulated from open-pit mining operations, carried out between 1936 and 2005. Over the decades during which these dumps were piled up, oxides and low-grade sulphides of copper formed a large part of the tonnage deposited on surface. Recovery of this copper is achieved by in-situ leaching followed by SX-EW.