AusIMM Mill Operators' Conference- the final two days

I am deeply appreciative of the time spent by Dr. Kathryn Hadler, of Imperial College, in aiding MEI's Jon Wills in preparation of a report on MillOps 2018. Jon, Kathryn and family returned to UK last week, and their report on the final two days in Brisbane is below. Their report on Day 1 was published on 30th August.

The Brisbane Convention Centre

Thursday August 30th

Day two of the 14th Mill Operators’ Conference started with a plenary session focusing on education.  Neville Plint, director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland, gave a keynote talk on resourcing the mining industry, which included the interesting statistic that less than 1% of employees in the mining industry are metallurgists.  This statistic highlights the need for greater awareness of the work that metallurgists do, both within the industry and to the wider world.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of graduates in mining engineering and metallurgy is predicted to drop to below 50 in Australia, underlining the reality of the much-discussed future skills shortage.  One of the big challenges for universities is that courses need to be financially viable, which means they need to attract critical numbers of students.  While the mining industry needs educated mining engineers and metallurgists, young people, particularly in countries such as Australia, are not attracted to the perceived dirty and polluting world of mining.  University courses, therefore, cease to run, and industry does not benefit from new graduates bringing new ideas.

To address this, rather gloomy, state of affairs, Neville suggested a raft of measures that could be taken, including more partnerships between universities and industry, and steps to increase undergraduate intake.  More importantly, he highlighted the changing expectations of students and graduates to an increased focus on entrepreneurship.  Many young people, he argued, are no longer interested in working in a big company as a small cog in a big wheel, but rather are motivated by setting up their own businesses, even with the high risk of failure.  Perhaps we should be reaching out to these groups of graduates and engaging differently with the new generation of engineers, scientists and innovators?

This keynote talk was followed by a panel discussion chaired by Diana Drinkwater of Mineralis, and chair of the IMPC’s Education Commission.  Diana presented the results from a survey of delegates, showing that over 75% thought that the work of metallurgists was critical to successful mining operation.  Although this might have been expected from a conference predominantly for metallurgists, it does show that this small but important sector should perhaps be shouting more loudly about the work that it does.  The following discussion covered many topics, but one recurring point was the lack of promotion of the mining industry as a viable and modern career option.

The exhibition hall was once again busy during day 2 where it was great to catch up with old faces and to meet some of the Australian branches of companies that regularly sponsor MEI Conferences.

Jon with Craig Brown of Resources Engineering & Management

Glencore Technology, sponsors of MEI's Flotation '19 and Comminution '20

John Russell of Comminution '20 sponsor Russell Mineral Equipment, with Randolph Pax

Comminution '20 sponsor King's Ceramics and Chemicals were represented by
Cathy He and Alex Wang

2017 MEI Young Person's Award Winner Grant Ballantyne of JKMRC (right)
with Outotec's Sherwin Morgan

The Metso booth

The FLSmidth booth

The Mill Ops conference dinner is always a grand affair with entertainment to suit. Dinner sponsors Glencore admitted that the usual sponsor talk isn’t something that people want to hear and so they instead went live to the Woodlawn mine site in New South Wales where the latest IsaMill had just been installed. This became the first IsaMill to be named after a person following a competition and this was revealed as the Cameron Brown IsaMill!

Instead of the usual comedian this year's entertainer was “The Unusalist” Raymond Crowe who performed magic, mime and shadow plays to the highest standard, while as usual, the wine and conversation flowed.

 Friday August 31st

Day 3 started with a keynote talk from Andrew Newell of RPMGlobal on metallurgical testwork, and on the importance of getting it right.  This was a thorough overview of all the areas that metallurgical testwork is used, and highlighted the importance of communication with and involvement of the testing lab through all stages of development.  Andrew gave some handy hints on how to select the most suitable lab for testwork, including past experience with the ore of interest, and suggested that one of the most common issues is insufficient sampling and/or testwork.  There was an interesting discussion on standards in testing, and whether there were any guidelines for labs, outside of the standards set by the JORC code.  This, it was discussed, would be very difficult to implement, since every ore is different.

There followed a session on emerging technologies, including the Albion Process and high voltage pulse comminution, at the end of which the CEEC medal was awarded by Alison Keogh, CEEC Chief Executive, to Sam Palaniandy, Hidemasa Ishikawa, Matthew Spagnolo, Huiwen Zhou and Rinto Halomoan for their paper presented at 2017’s MetPlant conference entitled ‘Fine grinding circuit process improvement at the Karara Mine concentrator’.

The conference was closed by Katie Barns, who awarded the prize for best paper to Dirk Baas of PanAust Ltd and Luke Mikhael Gurieff for their optimisation work entitled ‘Developing flotation circuit control and automation at the Phu Kham copper-gold concentrator’, while the best presentation prize was awarded to Thomas Waters and Amanda Rice of Newcrest Mining for their presentation ‘The evolution of the Cadia 40’ SAG mill to treat the Cadia East orebody – a case study of incremental change leading to operational stability’.  Congratulations to the winners!

The final comments from Katie included a tribute to the graduates entering the field, stating that they are motivated, engaged and bring new ideas to address old problems. 

The theme of Mill Ops 18 was “Back to Basics”, and this was the underlying message of many of the talks in this interesting and informative conference.  There was great interest in subjects that are often overlooked (e.g. tailings), which will continue to grow in significance in future, and in the new generation entering (or yet to enter) the industry.  

More views and comments at #MillOps2018.

A short break in the Emerald Isle

Barbara and I rarely venture outside Cornwall in the summer, but we have just returned from a four night visit to Ireland, a welcome break from our hectic summer schedule of doing nothing. Although Dublin is only a one hour flight from Cornwall's Newquay Airport, this was our first visit to Ireland, apart from a few hours that I spent in Dublin in the early 90s on a consultancy job. Visiting Ireland is another great option for MEI Conference delegates, as Newquay Airport is only a 45 minute car journey from Falmouth, and there are regular flights from Dublin back to the London airports.

Ireland has a population of 4.8 million, of which around a third live in Dublin, a fascinating vibrant city, with over 750 pubs.

One of the many bridges across Dublin's River Liffey

 

Trinity College Dublin

The best of food and drink!

After spending a few hours in the capital, and sampling the Guinness, which always tastes better in Ireland, we took the train to Killarney, a journey of about 200 miles, which took a leisurely six and a half hours, as we chose to travel by the steam train which runs every couple of weeks. The restored locomotive and carriages are operated by the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland, and locomotive "Merlin", built in 1932, was used for express passenger trains between Dublin and Belfast, before being withdrawn from traffic in 1963. The long journey to Killarney was due to the frequent stops to replenish the water supply, as Merlin consumed 40 gallons of water every mile, as well as a ton of coal every 50 miles!

Barbara and Merlin

Killarney was our base for a 100 mile circular tour of the Ring of Kerry to take in some of Ireland's outstanding natural features.

 

Ireland is a highly recommended detour if you are travelling back to the UK's major airports from Cornwall.

Twitter @barrywills

Norman Lotter's personal view of Extraction 2018

Dr. Norman Lotter, President and Consulting Engineer for Flowsheets Metallurgical Consulting Inc., Canada, has asked me to share his personal experience of Extraction 2018, which was held in Ottawa last month as a joint venture between the SME, MetSoc and the CIM. A total of some 700 delegates attended, many from overseas.

Ronel and Tarun

"This was the first presentation of this conference, covering mineral processing (particularly flotation), hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy.  Each theme had been organised by visible professionals in their respective fields.  Dr. Ronel Kappes, Newmont, and Tarun Bhambhani, Solvay, were the flotation theme organisers and chairs.  This flotation session ran for two full days, and turned out to be the highest quality flotation session that I have seen in North America in many, many years. 

Many of the papers were presented by invitation, as were my two.  Together with Tim Napier-Munn, I presented some thoughts on The Value of Incremental Performance Gains - How to Secure and Quantify Small Gains, and my last paper with Dee (Bradshaw), The Formulation and Use of Mixed Collectors - Valuable Performance Gains, two themes that complemented each other rather well.

In the first paper, Tim and I set out the stage making the case that single large performance gains are really made up of lots of small ones, performed separately in a continuous improvement programme. The level of noise in the plant data emanating from a concentrator is the challenge, but this is easily dealt with by designed plant trials using the analysis of variance with on-off testing, and using the 95% confidence limit as the hurdle rate. 

In the second paper, Dee and I made the case for the next platform of mixed collector work, now including semiconductor theory and organic chemistry.  This new platform is by now about six years old, and is doing well with new and different solutions, cutting  down the length of empirical flotation testwork because we now have the fundamental information from the mineralogy and the semiconductors, thus the collector chemistry is relatively easy to work out (provided that one of the researchers is well-grounded in that field - for my part I studied organic for three years).  We presented some case studies demonstrating how this had worked. 

Of course it was a difficult paper for me because of Dee's very sad passing, but the last slide showed a portrait of her against the backdrop of Table Mountain, acknowledging her in memoriam.  So many of us in mineral processing were touched by her bubbly and social enthusiasm, as well as her excellent research and influence on students as they grew towards their potential".

There are more views on the conference at #Extraction2018

Jack Holmes inducted into International Mining Technology Hall of Fame

It was great to hear that Jack Holmes has been inducted into International Mining's Hall of Fame (MEI Online).

I met Jack for the first time fairly recently, last November in Cape Town (posting of 11th November 2017). He is a true Copperbelt legend, being responsible for bringing solvent extraction to Nchanga and to large scale copper operations.  His career progression at Nchanga was very rapid, and in 1964 he became Metallurgical Superintendent at Nchanga, and Metallurgical Manager in 1968 at the remarkably young age of 38.

Our separate paths at Nchanga crossed only very briefly, as Jack left in 1970 and moved south, first to Lusaka, and then in 1974 to Anglo's head office in Johannesburg, where he held senior positions in various operating divisions, becoming Technical Director of Anglo American in 1978.

Many congratulations Jack, on behalf of all of us at MEI.

Jack Holmes with the MEI family, Cape Town, 2017

 

Cornish mining's bright future- a perspective from Malaysia

My attention was drawn recently to an interesting article in the Borneo Sunday Post (August 12th 2018) written by Cornishman Alan Rogers, who, for the past four years, has been a columnist for ‘Nature Matters’ in this, the largest English paper in East Malaysia. Alan was born in Penzance, and educated at the Humphry Davy Grammar School in Penzance, and Oxford University. After 24 years as Deputy Head, and then Headmaster, of Wellington School Somerset, he became Principal of Lodge International School, Kuching, Sarawak, and since last year, although now living in Somerset, he has been a Governor and educational advisor to the Borneo International School, Kuching Sarawak.

Alan's interest in mining stems from his west Cornwall education and with friends at school whose fathers were at Geevor as tin miners, but who were formally Silesian coal miners who escaped to the UK at the outbreak of World War 2. Many of his friends at school also became mining engineers.

His article in the Borneo Sunday Post is a great review of tin mining, past and present, and how the fortunes of Cornwall might be revived with the exploitation of brines containing lithium, a metal which he describes as 'the new soft silver'. I am grateful to Alan for allowing me to publish his article here in full:

 

The rugged, peninsular county of Cornwall, UK, where I was born at its most southwestern extremity, abounded in the 18th and 19th centuries with tin and copper mines on an industrial scale. The last tin mine at South Crofty shut down in 1998, while the one nearest to my home, Geevor mine, closed in 1990. In that year, on that very day, as I drove past Geevor, I wept tears to see the miners leaving their lifelong place of work.

Over the years, I have taken many Malaysian friends from Sabah and Sarawak to the sites of these former mines. By the end of the 19th century, these deep shaft, underground tin mines, tunnelling out for hundreds of metres under the seabed, closed as they were no longer economically viable. Why? The answer lay in the development of alluvial surface mining of tin in another peninsula: Peninsular Malaysia and particularly in the Kinta Valley, centred on Ipoh in 1883.

The Kinta Valley in 1981

The tin in Cornwall was extracted as solid rock ore from metamorphic rocks on the edges of the granitic moorlands. In Malaysia, through deep-seated tropical weathering, the tin was washed out of the rocks to be deposited in riverbeds for dredging. In 1885, Malaysia was the leading country in the world for tin production. The tin capital of Europe, Cornwall, with its former 2,000 tin mines, was no more, for trading collapsed. Trading from here to Europe can be traced back to Phoenician Greek times, very, very many centuries ago and well before Julius Caesar invaded Britain with his Roman army.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of unemployed Cornish miners migrated to other deep mining areas of today’s Commonwealth countries. Southern Australia and South Africa were their main choices. Others opted for California. There, they worked underground in gold or diamond mines in whatever jobs they could find in mining operations, thus bringing their skills to the rock face.

There is still an old saying in Cornwall that, “Wherever you are in the world, at the bottom of a pit, you’ll find a ‘Cousin Jack.’” I was reminded about this expression when returning to London recently from a visit to Borneo. At the airport, waiting for the return of my luggage at a conveyor belt, I casually talked to another passenger who came from North Wales. He was working in Australian mines and said that he had met many a ‘Cousin Jack’ over the years there. “It’s a small world,” I replied.

At airports all computers and mobile phones must be declared in hand luggage and all baggage screened. Security personnel are not only checking for illegal drugs, weapons, and potential bomb devices but also upon the quantities of a certain metal that can create fire hazards if stored in an aircraft hold. The answer is simply lithium. This soft silver and white alkaline element is found with other minerals in igneous related rocks or in brine pools. It is the lightest chemical element and the lightest of metals, easily sliced with a knife and with such low density it can float on salt water.

Lithium was first discovered in 1817, as an element, by a Swedish chemist Johann Arfredson in the mineral petalite. This mineral is located in pegmatite granites as well as in the sea and in salt lakes in the form of lithium chloride (brine). In the early 1820s, the distinguished Cornish chemist Sir Humphry Davy used electrolysis on lithium oxide to produce the metal. Today there is an explosive growth in the demand for lithium which, on trading-markets, almost equals gold in price for, in the last 10 years, a tonne of lithium has doubled in price.

This year, almost 1 per cent of vehicles run on electricity and use 50 per cent of the world’s lithium-ion battery supplies. Within the next two years, batteries will account for 60 per cent of lithium demands. Cost efficiencies in lithium battery production and kilowatt hours of running time have increased enormously since the mid-1990s.

Today, of the world’s total production of lithium, 40 per cent is used in batteries, 30 per cent in ceramic and glass industries, 8 per cent in lubricating greases – especially for aircraft, and 10 per cent in anti-depressant medicines. In my household, my hearing aid, smoke detector, laptop computers, and mobile phones all contain lithium-ion batteries. Several of my neighbours’ houses with south facing roofs have installed solar panels with lithium batteries attached in which to store and release energy in times of power cuts. A summer’s heatwave in the UK this year saw electricity surges as fans and air conditioning systems were switched on, with inevitable power cuts. I only wish my roof was facing in the right direction.

This year, in terms of actual production, Australia tops the list followed by Chile and Argentina with China in hot pursuit. Several countries, including the USA, do not declare, for security reasons, the actual annual amounts of this element they produce. Over 50 per cent of the world’s lithium reserves are located in ‘The Lithium Triangle’ of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. In Chile’s Atacama Desert lies the largest lithium mine in the world where lithium salts are dried out in sun from huge lakes of brine. Recent drillings in Peru have revealed large deposits but are they economically viable in terms of production costs? Investors seem to think so.

Sir Humphry Davy is accredited as the inventor of the Davy lamp, a handheld lamp that miners could take underground for illumination even where mine gases existed. Today, it is thought that Cornwall is the only county in the UK to hold viable deposits of lithium, which could self-sustain British manufacturers for years to come. The worldwide demand for this metal is likely to rise two to threefold in the next eight years.

Lithium is not a new discovery in Cornwall, for in the 19th century mining records revealed underground springs containing lithium salts. However, there was no immediate market for this alkaline metal. With the aid of satellite technology, images of huge swathes of a country can be examined by geologists through orbiting satellite-images. Areas of profitable spots of lithium sources can be easily spotted and other minerals identified before test drilling begins. From the satellites, hot liquid spots can be identified, where reactions with the granitic rocks produce lithium-bearing salts in solution. From space, local vegetation colourations can be traced to lithium in subterranean deposits.

I just wonder whether in Perak’s Kinta Valley, where alluvial deposits of tin were once dredged out, there are unexplored deposits of lithium salts in the river silt. Alluvial tin was the result of rainwater washing out tin from tropical, deeply-weathered granite. If lithium could be extracted there on an economically viable scale, it would prove to be a huge boost to Malaysia’s very fast growing electronics and electrical industries.

As mentioned earlier, tin is now again becoming a more expensive metal and thus interest has renewed in the reopening of the underground mines in Cornwall, where that metal ore together with lithium salts could both be extracted. Already exploratory drilling has taken place in former mines in East Cornwall as a joint venture between UK and Australian mining companies. A Canadian company is hoping to ‘float’ the former South Crofty tin mine, in West Cornwall, on the London Stock Exchange anytime now. If this is successful amongst potential investors, mining operations will restart in 2021.

Adapting an old American expression, I would even go as far as to say, “There’s tin and lithium in them old hills!”

Steve Morrell is inducted into the International Mining Technology Hall of Fame

Great to hear that Dr. Steve Morrell has been inducted into International Mining's Hall of Fame (MEI Online). Steve was a Masters student at Australia's JKMRC around 30 years ago, and the founding Director of the JKMRC, Prof. Alban Lynch, was also inaugurated into the Hall of Fame five years ago (posting of 5th December 2013).

Steve has been a major contributor to MEI's comminution conferences, as a founder of CITIC SMCC Process Technology Pty Ltd, Australia, which provides independent technical services to various mining projects, mainly in the area of comminution circuit design, technology and equipment selection, and optimization of mineral processing plants. The company operates as an independent consulting company, and is ultimately owned by conference sponsor CITIC Heavy Industries, a market leader in China with equipment operating successfully in China and around the world, including Asia, Europe, America, Africa and Australia.

Steve is pictured below (centre) with Joe Pease, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2016, and Chris Greet, at Comminution '16.