Season's Greetings from the MEI Family

It was Christmas lunch at Amanda and Richards' house today, in the village of Mabe, just outside Falmouth.

We would like to thank everyone who has sent their best wishes to us at this time of year and we wish you all a happy and successful 2010.

Canada’s Queen’s University receives unprecedented award

They must be celebrating Christmas early in Kingston, Ontario, with the news that Queen’s University Mining Department has received a $10 million donation from mining entrepreneur Robert Buchan (left).

It's the largest single donation to mining education in Canadian history and will help drive the development of the global mineral resource industry. In recognition of this exceptional gift, the department will be renamed the Buchan Department of Mining.

The full story is on MEI Online.

Flotation ’11 off to a flying start

Maintaining the momentum of last month’s Flotation ’09, which was attended by 193 international delegates, the next scheduled flotation conference has already attracted 3 corporate sponsors. Two of them, Maelgwyn Mineral Services and FLSmidth, sponsored Flotation ’09 and are strong MEI supporters, Maelgwyn also sponsoring Precious Metals ’10 and FLSmidth having sponsored this year’s Physical Separation ’09.

Martyn Hay’s successful one man company, Eurus Mineral Consultants is a new flotation sponsor. Martyn presented an excellent paper at Flotation ’09 and also sponsored Nickel Processing ’05.

The website for Flotation ’11 is up and running and we look forward to working on this major event over the next couple of years, with our two MEI flotation consultants, Profs. Dee Bradshaw of JKMRC, Australia, and J-P Franzidis of University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Copenhagen and the Minerals Industry

After the predictable fiasco of Copenhagen, the question is where does this leave the minerals industry, one of the world’s greatest emitters of CO2 and under intense pressure to reduce those emissions?

The failure to arrive at binding legal agreements, merely producing expressions of intent, will fuel the global warming deniers who will use Copenhagen to show how politicians are happy to embrace anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory to collect green taxes, but when it comes to the big crunch they do basically nothing.

There is a big difference between a denier and a sceptic. The former often has little scientific knowledge and may have vested interests, in the same way that the tobacco companies once denied the link between smoking and lung cancer.

There is nothing wrong with being sceptical, as scientists should question the science of other scientists. Most scientists that I speak to agree that humans play a part in climate change, but are unsure of the extent of human input. The Royal Society’s committee on climate change is very much pro-AGW, but when I pushed one of their senior men some time ago as to what extent humans have contributed to temperature increases he said that he thought that AGW might have contributed about 90%.

This may seem a very vague response, but it is a sensible one, as in truth nobody really knows the human contribution. The important point is that if we agree that to some extent we contribute, then the exercise reduces to simple risk management- I don’t expect my house to catch fire today, but I pay the insurance just in case- it is too risky not to do.

So I ask the question again. What does the minerals industry do now- proceed with expensive schemes to reduce emissions, such as carbon capture and storage, or do as little as possible and make hay while the sun shines (ever hotter)? These are questions that I hope will be asked and hopefully answered at Climate Change ’11 in Falmouth.

Sustainability Special Issue goes to press

I have just given Elsevier the go-ahead to proceed with publication of the next special issue of Minerals Engineering- Sustainability, Resource Conservation and Recycling, which will be published in March (Volume 23 Issue 3).

This will contain 15 selected papers from SRCR ’09, which was held in Cape Town in April, and has been ably guest edited by Profs. Markus Reuter (Ausmelt Ltd, Australia) and Kari Heiskanen (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland).

The next conference, SRCR ’11 will be held in Falmouth in May 2011, immediately followed by Climate Change and the Minerals Industry ’11 and Risk-Based Approaches to Major Decisions ’11.

It promises to be a week not to be missed!

Imperial Research Team Impresses

I was browsing the October issue of the Journal of Southern African IMM this morning and came across “A Letter from London” by Prof. Jan Cilliers (left) of Imperial College.

Jan points out that in terms of actual operations and tonnages the UK is not much of a mining country any more (although there may be an exciting new polymetallic mine in Cornwall soon). It does, however, have an enormous influence, London being the home of head offices of a number of major mining houses, and the UK has a very strong mining and mineral processing research presence internationally.

None more so than Jan’s impressive team of young researchers at Imperial College, who were out in force at last month’s Flotation ’09 conference in Cape Town, presenting 7 high-quality papers.

Jan must be congratulated on bring together such enthusiastic and bright young people. Just over a year ago Rio Tinto announced a major partnership with Imperial College, creating the Rio Tinto Centre for Advanced Mineral Recovery. The Centre is a research hub in which world class scientists are developing innovative technologies to improve mineral extraction and recovery, while minimising environmental impacts. The Imperial partnership is one of three that Rio Tinto has established, and the only one outside Australia.

The Rio Tinto Centre currently runs four projects, each over a 5 year lifetime. Two projects are in mineral processing: froth flotation and leaching, and two in geophysics. Complex computation is a major component of each of the four projects.

Keep up the good work, Jan et al.