Looking forward to 2018

Happy New Year everyone. There is much to look forward to this year, with the hoped for resurgence of the mining industry being on top of the list.

There are 5 MEI Conferences this year, and MEI will also be represented at other events as a media partner.

In February I will leave the relatively mild winter of Cornwall for the harsh Minnesota winter, for the SME Annual Meeting, this year for the first time in Minneapolis. I rarely miss the SME Annual Meeting, which is always a great networking event, its huge exhibition providing the main focus.

In April the MEI team will be in Cape Town for Comminution '18, our biggest event of the year, which has a fine programme of over 90 papers, and currently has only one exhibit booth remaining for rental (more details on the posting of 4 December 2017).

Delegates at Comminution '16

We have a brand new venue in June, the Windhoek Country Club in Namibia, where Biohydrometallurgy '18 and Sustainable Minerals '18 will run back to back. We will be drafting the provisional programme in a few weeks' time, so it is still not too late to submit abstracts (posting of 30 October 2017).

Desert and sand in Namibia

In August Jon will represent MEI at The AusIMM Mill Operators' Conference in Brisbane, another great networking event, and then in September the whole team will be in Moscow, for the year's largest gathering of mineral processors at the International Mineral Processing Congress, being held for the first time in Russia.

And then back to Cape Town in November for Process Mineralogy '18, and a new MEI Conference, Developments in the Processing of the "Hi-Tech" Metals (see also posting of 5 June 2017).  There are calls for abstracts for both of these events.

I am sure that as the year progresses there will be much more for me to report on, including the presentation to the 2017 recipient of the MEI Young Persons Award, for which nominations should be submitted by 2nd February (posting of 17 December), and all of us at MEI look forward to catching up with as many of you as possible during our travels around the world.

Twitter @barrywills