The Opening of the Newly Expanded Mineral Processing Facilities at Wardell Armstrong

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Things are happening in Cornwall's mining sector. Yesterday Barbara and I were two of the invited guests celebrating the opening of Wardell-Armstrong's extended mineral processing facilities on the Wheal Jane site between Falmouth and Truro. It was great to see so many representatives from the major Cornwall Mining Alliance companies all pulling together for the common good of this ancient mining county.

Cornwall is the headquarters of Wardell Armstrong International, with its historical mining links, sixty-strong team and well established technical resources.  The firm’s London offices are located  in Chancery Lane, Holborn, to be within easy walking distance of City clients and contacts. Wardell Armstrong International also has established offices in Moscow and in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to service Russia and Central Asia, as well as specialist mining teams operating out of Wardell Armstrong’s ten UK offices.

Wardell Armstrong's impressive metallurgical team

Managing Director Dr. Phil Newall and Head of Mineral Processing Phil King have been with WA since it acquired CSMA Consultants in 1999. Before the acquisition they were both with CSMA for several years, and have memories, as do I, of their tiny office on the School of Mines campus, with no testwork facilities of their own.

A warm welcome from Phil Newall.......

.......and from Phil King

Phil Newall and I go back a long way. Prior to CSMA he was a lecturer in mining geology at Camborne School of Mines, and Phil and I organised the first of the international conferences to be associated with CSM and CSMA, Comminution '89.

With Phil Newall at Comminution '89

This was followed in 1990 by Gravity '90, and then in 1991 our first overseas event, Minerals Engineering '91 in Singapore. Phil was also involved with Minerals Engineering '92 in Vancouver, before he and fellow geologist, Process Mineralogy '18 keynote speaker Alan Butcher, diversed into Mineral Exploration conferences, which were held in parallel with the annual Minerals Engineering conferences in 1993 and 1994, in Cape Town and Lake Tahoe respectively.

It was good to catch up with Phil yesterday and reminisce about the old days at CSM.

Twitter @barrywills

‘The war on waste’: How could the mining industry respond?

This is the question that Dr. Anita Parbhakar-Fox will ask at her keynote lecture at Sustainable Minerals '20 in Falmouth. Anita is the leader of the Geometallurgy, Geoenvironment and Mining program at the Centre for Ore Deposit and Exploration Science, University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research is focussed on mine waste characterisation to facilitate environmental conscientious mine planning and improved waste management practices.  She is committed to improving mine closure practices and in 2018 became a member of the Victorian Government’s Technical Review Board for Mine Rehabilitation. 

According to Anita an international ‘war on waste’ is waging whereby industries and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impacts our linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy facilitates. The promotion, and in some cases adoption, of circular economy principles has grown in recent years but how has this impacted on the mining industry, and more specifically, mine waste characterisation and management practices?  Fundamentally, we mine waste, not ore. The large tonnages of waste rock handled at mine sites, particularly open cuts, illustrates this, and we will continue to mine in this manner to meet the metal demands of our growing global community. Therefore, it is imperative that the waste we produce is thoroughly characterised to determine: i) if it can be further utilised i.e., following circular economy principles; or ii) if it truly is waste how can it be disposed of so that the environmental risk is minimised?  

Traditionally mine waste characterisation involves the integrated use of geochemical static tests with mineralogical tools used only where classification conflicts arise. However, with new tools becoming available to the mining industry (e.g., portable technologies, hyperspectral infrared and XRF platforms for drill core analyses, machine learning algorithms for image processing) the opportunity has arisen to improve waste characterisation protocols to better understand their properties, in particular their mineralogy, which is the key to improving waste management practices.

Once produced, mine waste materials are stored in piles or other designated repositories and are engineered to minimise environmental risk. However, if detailed waste characterisation is not undertaken then determining if it has any functionality is challenging. Performing geometallurgical studies on existing waste, including the use of mineral chemistry tools, could resuscitate operations on the brink of closure by identifying commodities not originally sought. Therefore, searching in our mine waste presents an opportunity to identify and market ‘green metals’ with the very real benefit of environmental de-risking (i.e., if the waste contains fertile sulphides prone to generating acid drainage).

If mine waste properties are understood, then these materials can be carefully engineered to assist with managing other industrial waste products, for example, carbon dioxide emissions. Recent studies have discussed the role of mine tailings in carbon sequestration and by using new technologies during early life-of-mine stages the industry can rapidly identify if their tailings have amenable mineralogical properties to enable this. More opportunities lie in blending or co-disposing of mine waste with alkaline wastes generated by a range of industries including paper milling (green liquor dregs), aluminium refining (red-muds) and even fisheries (spent shells). By marrying waste from two industries, the overall waste footprint (and associated management costs) can be reduced, and the risks associated with both minimised.

Anita will show that whilst pilot studies have demonstrated the application of these research endeavours, how this translates into routine practice remains a fundamental challenge. 

Updates on Sustainable Minerals '20 can be found at #SustainableMinerals20.

International chemical company Clariant to sponsor Flotation '19

Good to hear that Clariant, a world leader in specialty chemicals, is sponsoring Flotation '19, as their representatives always have something interesting to say.

At Flotation '15 Jacques Bezuidenhout of Clariant Germany, showed how Clariant collectors can be used as alternatives to xanthate collectors in traditional sulphide flotation applications. Xanthates, first used in flotation in 1924, are reported to be the most widely used of the thiol collectors. They are therefore widely considered to be the most important collectors for sulphide mineral flotation applications. It is nevertheless Clariant’s experience that there is an increasingly strong push against using xanthate collectors in both new and existing flotation plants. Clariant Mining Solutions, in order to address this unmet need, therefore developed a series of liquid collectors, soluble in water, which are able to completely replace various xanthate collector types in practice.

At Flotation '17 Linda Mahlangu, of Clariant Southern Africa, reviewed the potential of phosphoric acid esters for the flotation of oxidised copper minerals. Low grade oxide copper mineral flotation dates back almost 70 years. In the 1960’s the process involved 2 basic flotation methods (i) fatty acid flotation of oxide copper minerals and (ii) sulphidization of oxide copper minerals followed by flotation using sulphydryl collectors such as xanthates. Over the years the use of fatty acids to concentrate the copper oxides lost its popularity, with most operations preferring the controlled potential sulphidisation method. Linda showed how phosphoric acid esters, which have proven effective in selectively floating carbonates in the reverse flotation of phosphates, can be used as alternative collectors for oxide copper mineral flotation, particularly for carbonates such as malachite.

I'm sure that we can look forward to more innovative solutions at Flotation '19.

Current Flotation '19 sponsors

The latest conference updates can be found at #Flotation19.

Twitter @barrywills

Recent comments

There have been comments on the following postings since the last update:

Tunnelling, then and now: Cornwall's Great County Adit and the London Super Sewer
Great news for Starkey & Associates
Limitations to the commercial application of biohydrometallurgy for the treatment of base metal ores
Prof. Dee Bradshaw, 1958-2018: a great ambassador for women in mining
Richard Mozley's legacy lives on with the MGS
Steve Morrell is inducted into International Mining Technology Hall of Fame
Return to Chingola
Norman Lotter's personal view of Extraction 2018
What is the point of world university rankings?
Jack Holmes inducted into International Mining Technology Hall of Fame
How were your first two days at the Moscow IMPC?
An international gathering for the CSM Annual Dinner
Who was Julius Kruttschnitt?
Last of the summer sundowners
 

We welcome your comments on blog postings. If you do not have a Google account, the simplest way to add a comment is by selecting 'anonymous' as your profile, but please leave your name and affiliation in the comment. Alternatively, email your comment directly to bwills@min-eng.com.

If you would like to be alerted to postings, submit your email address via the box in the right hand column of the blog.

Last of the summer sundowners

Summer has ended. Last night was the last of the summer sundowners at Falmouth's Chain Locker pub. Despite gusty winds and heavy rain, around 20 regulars were in attendance, and it was good to welcome a few new CSM students, recently enrolled on the MSc courses. 

As always, there was a strong contingent from Cornish Lithium. The company is well on the way to the development of commercial extraction of lithium from naturally occurring hot springs deep below the surface of Cornwall. The question always asked is how will the lithium be extracted from the brines? There are several new technologies now available including ion-exchange, as reported a few days ago on MEI Online, and Cornish Lithium plan to make use of such innovative methods.

At the May sundowner our thoughts were with one of the great Camborne School of Mines characters, Ron Hooper, who had died the previous day. Today we toasted the memory of fellow nonagenarian John Shrimpton, who commenced his lecturing duties at CSM in 1955 and retired as head of mining in 1985. He was a colleague of mine for exactly half my time at CSM, a true gentleman who had served with distinction in the RAF in WW2.  Below is a great photo, taken in 2009, of John with Ron Hooper and mineral processor Jim Turner, also no longer with us.

John Shrimpton (left) with Ron Hooper and Jim Turner

The next Cornish Mining Sundowner will be held at the Royal Oak in Perranwell on Thursday 18th October.

Twitter @barrywills

Major IMPC Awards to two distinguished American Professors

Over the past 15 years I have photographed the recipients of the International Mineral Processing Council's major awards. This year there is no MEI representation at the IMPC, due to visa problems, but ironically neither of this year's recipients were able to travel to receive their awards, which were announced this evening at the IMPC Gala Dinner in Moscow.

The 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award winner is Prof. Jan Miller of the University of Utah. Prof. Miller is the Ivor D. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Metallurgical Engineering at the University of Utah. He received his BS degree from Pennsylvania State University, and his MS and PhD degrees from the Colorado School of Mines. At the University of Utah Professor Miller has devoted over 40 years to undergraduate and graduate education. His research covers mainly the areas of mineral processing and hydrometallurgy, specializing in particle characterization, aqueous solution chemistry, and colloid and surface chemistry. He is a member of SME, TMS, and ACS. The recipient of numerous honours and awards, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993. In recent years Jan has become a world leader in the field of x-ray tomography in minerals processing, and presented keynote lectures on this subject at MEI's Process Mineralogy '12 and Process Mineralogy '17 in Cape Town.

Jan Miller (centre) with Henrique Kahn and Ben Tordoff at Process Mineralogy '17

Jan Miller with Xuming Wang and Barry Wills, IMPC 2016 Quebec

Prof. Douglas Fuerstenau has added the IMPC's Distinguished Service Award to his long list of prestigious awards- he was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in San Francisco in 1995.

San Francisco 1995, with Eric Forssberg and John Herbst

The IMPC awards are just two of very many awards that he has received during his illustrious career, and in his MEI interview 3 years ago he told me that his proudest moment was when he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976, considered the highest honour for an engineer in the United States.  Now only three months away from his 90th birthday it is a shame that he was unable to make the very long journey to Russia to collect his award, as he has been a very active participant in the International Mineral Processing Congresses, starting with the 6th Congress in Cannes in 1963. Fifty years ago he attended the 8th IMPC in Leningrad, and he told me that it was  a great experience meeting the major Russian mineral processing scientists and engineers of the 1950s and 60s. He last attended an IMPC in 2014 in Santiago, where he congratulated me on receiving the Distinguished Service Award, and I hope to reciprocate soon, possibly in Denver next year for the International Symposium in his honour.

Santiago 2014 with Doug Fuerstenau and Eric Forssberg

Twitter @barrywills