Flotation ’11 opens with record number of delegates

The conference facilities at Cape Town’s beautiful Vineyard Hotel were at full capacity this morning, as I welcomed the 246 delegates who will be attending the Fundamentals Symposium for the first two days of Flotation ’11.

The record turnout reflects the increasing importance of flotation in the minerals industry and to society as a whole. There is little doubt that the minerals industry is the world’s most important industry. It is the primary industry and without it no other industry could survive, and there is nothing truer than the old adage that whatever we touch is either mined or grown. In all recorded history, all great civilisations have had one thing in common, and that is a thriving minerals industry, and the industry thrives today mainly as a result of the insatiable demand for metals and minerals from China and India.

The most important area of the minerals industry is mineral processing and extractive metallurgy, which produces these metal and minerals, and continuously has to evolve to process ores of ever lower grade, and increasing complexity and refractoriness, and find ways of treating 'new' metals such as indium, germanium and neodymium, little heard of 20 years ago.

Arguably the most important unit operation in mineral processing is froth flotation; it is ubiquitous and it would be hard to imagine processing base and precious metals and industrial minerals without this technique. So, having argued my case that flotation may be the most important technological development since the discovery of smelting, I handed over to MEI Consultant Prof. Dee Bradshaw, of the JKMRC, Australia, who highlighted the importance of modelling, which features strongly over the next few days.  She highlighted what it is that we want from models, how we develop them and how they can mislead and intimidate us.

Following an excellent keynote presentation by McGill University’s Prof. Jim Finch, a long day of technical presentations beckoned.

I take this opportunity to thank the 17 sponsors who have supported this event.

Flotation '11- the first arrivals

Well over 100 of the delegates attending Flotation '11, which starts tomorrow, arrived today at the Vineyard Hotel, in the Claremont suburb of Cape Town, for preregistration and a welcoming wine reception in the exhibition area.

Paul Gould of Clariant, with Grame Jameson (left)
and Roe-Hoan Yoon (right)

One of the exhibitors, the American company Clariant, will be holding a draw each day, to give away 4 copies of the SME publication Froth Flotation: a Century of Innovation. Two of the eminent editors of the book, Prof. Graeme Jameson, of the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Prof. Roe-Hoan Yoon, of Virginia Tech, USA, both conference delegates, will be signing the copies awarded to the lucky recipients.

As the wine flowed there was a sense of anticipation towards the next 4 days and the high calibre programme that is on offer.

Great food, great company

We met up with our good friends Dean Eastbury, of Elsevier, and Norm Lotter, of Xstrata Process Support today, and tonight shared a memorable meal with them at the superb The Square restaurant at the Vineyard Hotel. Then an early night prior to tomorrow's preparation for Flotation '11.

Cricket in Cape Town

The MEI team is now in Cape Town, ready for next week's Flotation '11.

We had tickets for today's 4th day of the test match at nearby Newlands, between South Africa and Australia, which ended bizarrely yesterday after just over 2 days play.

So this morning I consoled myself by walking across the road from the Vineyard Hotel to the Claremont Oval, to watch a match between two local Western Cape sides.

Although not Newlands, the view of the mountain was just as magnificent, and the standard of cricket was, of course, much higher than that which the Australian test side can provide.

From the MEI Archives #4 - Adelaide 2000

As Flotation '11 commences tomorrow, I thought it might be appropriate to add a photo taken at the 1st of this series of events, in Adelaide, March 2000.

This group photo was taken at the wine reception for Flotation 2000, sponsored by Amdel, and held in their labs in Adelaide.

Do you recognise anyone?

The minerals industry- the acceptable face of capitalism?

On Monday I will be opening Flotation '11, the largest MEI conference to date. The record numbers reflects the importance of the minerals industry in modern society. It feeds all other industries and is itself driven by the voracious appetites of emerging super-economies such as China, India and Brazil.

But what do these new powerful economies have in common? Ironically extreme poverty; a great yawning gap between the super-rich and the ultra poor. I notice this gap widening every time I visit South Africa, the main MEI Conferences venue, where the strengthening economy has considerably benefited the employed middle classes, while making life increasingly difficult for the unemployed.

I was born and raised in a cotton mill town in the north of England, where nothing had changed much since the Industrial Revolution. In the late 19th and up to the mid 20th centuries, capitalism was based mainly on manufacturing. The mill owners were the fat-cats of their day, but they provided plentiful employment from the middle-class skilled workers down to the working class unskilled workers.

It is very different today. Modern, avaricious and over-paid, fat-cats sit in front of computer screens, spending, borrowing, and gambling money that they do not have. Their particular skill does not lend itself to propagation down the skill-chain, so the gap between those who have and those who don't inevitably widens.

These people have, quite rightly, been vilified recently, but one of the industries which is often vilified, and quite wrongly, is the minerals industry. Very few people outside our industry have good things to say about it and there is always opposition to the building of a new mine. The argument is often that the mining company is only in it to make money. This is partly true, but in this respect they do not differ greatly from the old cotton-mill owners, and the reason that the mining company can make money is because of the demand for metals and minerals from everyone on the planet ("everything we touch is either mined or grown").

We cannot choose where to mine; geology dictates that most ore-bodies are found in remote, and often inhospitable, regions. A new mine provides direct employment for skilled and unskilled workers, but more importantly much employment is indirectly provided, due to the need to build new townships around a mine site, with all the amenities such as schools, hospitals, sports clubs, shops etc.

So, as we see capitalism coming under fire around the world, can we at least argue that the minerals industry is the acceptable face of capitalism?