An all-Jameson Cells flotation circuit at New Britannia, Canada

It was good to hear from Peter Amelunxen last month. Peter was the first recipient of the MEI Young Person's Award in 2011, when he was then with Aminpro in Chile. He and his family moved to Toronto a couple of weeks ago and should be coming out of their mandatory 14 days quarantine about now.

Peter with 2018 MEI Award winner Zhiyong Gao at Flotation '19

Peter is now Vice-President of Technical Services for Flotation '21 sponsor Hudbay, a diversified mining company primarily producing copper concentrate (containing copper, gold and silver) and zinc metal. Directly and through its subsidiaries, Hudbay owns three polymetallic mines, three operating ore concentrators and a zinc production facility in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada and Cusco, Peru, and copper projects in Arizona and Nevada, USA.

In 2015 Hudbay purchased the Snow Lake Project, which included the New Britannia gold concentrator. They are now in the process of building a copper flotation circuit to treat the copper-gold ores from the Lalor deposit, and they have chosen to create a flotation circuit made entirely of Jameson Cells. The northern Manitoba operation needs to process finer grinds and higher grades of ore, and to manage costs while doing so means pursuing as small a footprint as possible, while still delivering optimised recoveries and concentrate grades.

Jameson Cells

Peter tells me that the idea for all Jameson cells came about before the Flotation '19 conference.  He had been working with Contact cells for a long time at Aminpro and had always recognized their potential for those applications that had a high degree of liberated hydrophobic mineral, combined with a high susceptibility to entrainment, such as copper/moly separation or polymetallic circuits. New Britannia is neither of those, but it still works because the flotation feed particle size is driven by gold liberation for the gold leach circuit, so the copper is fully liberated and very fast floating, but also highly susceptible to entrainment (because of the fine grind). 

Hudbay had recently recruited an Australian engineer, Matthew Taylor, who had experience with Jameson Cells, flotation modelling, and piloting, and he drove the concept forward in collaboration with Virginia Lawson and her team from Glencore Technology, who sent them a pilot unit and provided technical support. The pilot unit was tested last summer at the nearby Stall concentrator, which also processes ore from the Lalor Mine to produce zinc and copper concentrates.

Flotation '19 gave them an opportunity to discuss results, share ideas, and build relationships with Virginia and Graeme Jameson and "even the guys from other flotation companies, who also provide very good technology that I would consider for other applications that may be less appropriate to pneumatic cells.  That’s the value of the flotation conferences and why we sponsor the events!".

Grame Jameson and Virginia Lawson cut the 30th Anniversary Jameson Cell cake at Flotation '19

Peter concluded by saying that through Matt’s work, combined with excellent support and collaboration from the Stall operations team, the New Britannia project team, and the Aecom engineering team, Hudbay identified significant reductions in flotation capital and operating costs by eliminating conventional tank cells and reducing the circuit complexity, while also identifying some exciting performance improvement opportunities at the Stall concentrator through retrofitting Jameson cells in the existing copper and zinc circuits.

@barrywills