A Busy Year Ahead for MEI

Happy New Year to you all and let's hope it will be a better one than 2025, with less conflict and upheaval across the world. The MEI team will be represented at a number of conferences this year and we hope to catch up with as many of you as possible.

I have been to 22 Annual Meetings of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, but last year's event in Denver may have been my last. Next month's SME Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City will be attended by Jon, so look out for him there and pass any interesting news on to him, as he will be reporting daily.

In the following month Amanda will be in Adelaide for MetPlant 2026. MEI is a media partner and I look forward to Amanda's report on this, which is Australia's premier mineral processing event.

One of the keynote speakers at MetPlant is Prof. Kevin Galvin, Director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Enabling Eco-Efficient Beneficiation of Minerals at the University of Newcastle. Kevin will also be presenting a keynote lecture at Mineral Processing Circuits '26 in Cape Town in April, MEI's second conference of the year. 

Immediately preceding Mineral Processing Circuits '26 is Physical Separation '26 and there is much to look forward to in these two conferences at the Vineyard Hotel.

Amanda will be in Orléans, France in September for the 26th International Biohydrometallurgy Symposium. MEI is a media partner, and abstract submission is open to the 15th of this month.

MEI is also a media partner for the International Mineral Processing Congress, which will be held at Cape Town's Convention Centre in October, five years after its scheduled 2020 date, which had to be postponed due to Covid. 

MEI will be represented by Amanda and me and Amanda's son Will, the latest member of the team. We look forward to this with much anticipation as the Cape Town IMPC of 2003 was one of the best in the series. The organisers of IMPC 2026 expect to gather over 1,000 professionals and academics from the mining industry, representing around 50 countries. The highlight will be the conference banquet where Lifetime Achievement, Distinguished Service and Young Authors' Awards will be made.

We will be back in Cape Town the following month for MEI's Process Mineralogy '26 and Critical Minerals' 26 and there are calls for abstracts for both of these events.

There is much to look forward to in 2026!

#MEIBlog

December summary: Christmas in the Alps

Flotation '25, which dominated our November, now seems an age away. We were blessed with hot sunny weather in Cape Town, but returned to a very wet and windy Cornwall.

It was great to prematurely celebrate my 80th birthday at the conference dinner in Cape Town (posting of 19th November), and a week after my birthday I had a belated birthday treat with family from the north of England, a celebration also of Barbara's 79th birthday.

Christmas was special, with a week in Méribel in the French Alps with Amanda and Jon and families. Méribel lies at the heart of Les Trois Vallées (The Three Valleys- Courcheval, Méribel and Belleville), the largest interconnected ski area in the world. 

The Courcheval Valley from La Saulire which separates the Méribel and Courcheval Valleys

Skiing days are in the past now for Barbara and me, but the rest of the family. from expert (Jon) to beginners,  made full use of one of the best all-round ski resorts in the Alps.

Barbara and I made use of pedestrian lift passes to take gondolas up the mountains, just for the views and to visit summit restaurants, and to walk trails through forests and mountain landscapes.

The mountain scenery is stunning but was enhanced on Christmas Eve by a temperature inversion, which produced dense clouds and a sprinkling of snow in the valleys with clear, warmer air above the ocean of clouds.

Christmas Day Après-ski 

The MEI team, Jon, Amanda, Will, Barry

Now we are all back home and preparing for the New Year, so I take this opportunity of wishing you all the very best for 2026.

#MEIBlog

Season's Greetings from MEI

On behalf of the family at MEI, I would like to wish you all a wonderful festive season and a very happy New Year. This year we are all celebrating Christmas together at Meribel in the French Alps.

We hope to catch up with as many of you as possible in 2026 in various parts of the world.

Thank you for supporting all that we do and a big thank you to all of you who have sent us Christmas greetings by email and via LinkedIn.

Annual Christmas visit to Camborne

Camborne, once one of the world's richest towns, the centre of Cornwall's flourishing 18th and 19th centuries tin and copper industries, is now regarded as the most impoverished town in Cornwall. Each December we make our annual pilgrimage to Camborne's famous Tyacks Hotel, once a meeting place for mining engineers from around the world (see posting of 20 December 2024) and only a few hundred yards from where the Camborne School of Mines stood until its relocation in 1975.

Last Saturday we were at Tyacks for the Camborne School of Mines Association (CSMA) Christmas lunch, attended mainly by past students and staff of Camborne School of Mines. Prior to sitting down to lunch it was good to talk to a few old mining graduates. Pete Shepherd (1967) was with his wife Mary, who was Secretary of the CSMA from 1999-2005. Julian North (1989) is currently lead miner at the developing South Crofty Tin Mine and Mike Simpson (1979) is General Manager at the Geevor Tin Mine Heritage Centre.

With Julian, Pete, Mary and Mike

There were only two current CSM students at  the lunch, but they were very special guests. Sophie Glassford is the CSM Student Union President and Captain of CSM's team in the International Mining Games, which will be held in Arizona in March. She is in the final year degree course in Engineering Geology and Geotechnics, as is Lili Szepesy-Szep, who is Chair of CSM Sports. They are pictured below with Carol Richards, a former CSMA Secretary and the current secretary Nicola Wilton.

Lili, Carol, Sophie and Nicola

A great afternoon at Tyacks, as always:

Left: Steve Pendray and CSMA hosts Andy Wetherelt and Nicola Wilton
Right: Barbara Wills with Karen Powell and John Hills

Yesterday evening we should have been at Tyacks again for the Christmas Cornish Mining Sundowner, but one thing you can't rely on is the good old Great Western Railway. Due to severe delays and disruptions on the main line from Truro to Penzance we had to return to Falmouth, missing what is normally one of the best sundowners of the year. I thank Steve Pendray for the photo below, which shows we missed a great event.

Hopefully we will be at the next sundowner, at the County Arms Hotel, Truro from 5.30 pm on Thursday January 15th.

Nominations invited for the 2025 MEI Young Person's Award

It is time to start thinking of who you might like to nominate for the 2025 MEI Young Person's Award, to join the list of exceptional young mineral processors who have made outstanding contributions to minerals engineering.

2011 Peter Amelunxen
2012 Randall Zahn
2013 Rodrigo Carvalho
2014 Elizabeth Whiteman
2015 Hakan Dundar
2016 Swadhin Saurabh
2017 Grant Ballantyne
2018 Zhiyong Gao
2019 Nikhil Dhawan
2020 Ahmad Hassanzadeh
2021 Paulina Quintanilla
2022 Anna Vanderbruggen
2023 Paulina Vallejos
2024 Arjun Pukkella

Nominations, for persons under 35 years of age at December 31st 2025, should be submitted by email to bwills@min-eng.com by Friday March 6th 2026. Nominations must come from a senior person, or persons, who have had first-hand experience of the work of the nominee.

Nominations should include the name, age and affiliation of the nominee, and reasons for the nomination. The recipient will receive an engraved award and a complimentary registration to any future MEI Conference, and the presentation will be made whenever a mutually convenient situation arises.

Two videos which capture the atmosphere of Flotation '25

We are immensely grateful to our 24 sponsors for making Flotation '25 such a success, but I must give a special thanks to MetSoP for providing this highly professional short video which certainly captures the atmosphere of the conference and exhibition. 

And a big thank you to the four young people, all attending their first MEI Conference, who spoke so eloquently of the event: Mohau Choke and Tafadzwa Mashamba of the University of Cape Town, Kalyani Mohanty, of Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain, and Portia Ngobeni, of BASF, South Africa.  

Top: Mohau Choke and Tafadzwa Mashamba
Bottom: Kalyani Mohanty and Portia Ngobeni

And thanks to MEI's new recruit, Will Collins, who made his own short video of that other important aspect of MEI events, networking.

#Flotation25