Tuesday at Flotation '25 and a surprise birthday celebration

Tuesday's programme was all about chemical reagents, beginning with a keynote lecture "Beyond reagent trials:  new directions in flotation chemistry research" from Liza Forbes representing Australia's JKMRC and the University of Newcastle.

Liza Forbes and Graeme Jameson

The satellite room proving popular again

The two biggest chemical company delegations are from South African reagents companies, sponsors AECI and MetSoP. AECI has become a regular supporter of MEI Conferences, including next year's Process Mineralogy '26 and Critical Minerals '26.

The AECI team

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a first time sponsor of an MEI flotation conference. Although their first time at a flotation conference they have been involved with a number of Process Mineralogy events. The company has launched its next generation Online Sampling and Elemental Analysis Station and the MSA-430 Multi-Stream Analyser, online systems designed for, it says, accurate, real-time elemental analysis of mineral slurry streams in processing plants. It was good to talk to their two representatives, Juan Urfanel (Spain) and Nur Muhamad (Australia).

The exhibition area was buzzing again, with lively discussion during the long breaks.

With delegates from DRC

Conference sponsor Capstone Copper is a copper-focused mining company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada and was formed in 2022 when Capstone Mining merged with Mantos Copper. Peter Amelunxen joined Capstone in April 2022 as Vice President, Technical Services and was promoted to Senior Vice President, Technical Services in August 2023. During the morning break Peter agreed to sponsor not only Flotation '27 but all forthcoming MEI Conferences!

Peter Amelunxen and MEI's Jon

Peter is one of five MEI Young Person's Awards winners at Flotation '25.  He was the first recipient of the award back in 2011 and in 2024 he received one of the SME's highest honours, the Antoine Gaudin Award. Zhiyong Gao, the 2018 winner,  is now Professor Vice Dean of the School of Minerals Processing and and Bioengineering, at Central South University, China. Although registered for the conference he had visa problems and unfortunately could not make it. Ahmad Hassanzadeh, who won the award in 2020 is now an independent consultant and works as the Chief Research Officer at Maelgwyn Mineral Services. UK. Paulina Vallejos, a researcher at Santa Maria University, Chile was the 2023 winner and Paulina Quintanilla won the award in 2021. She is now a Lecturer at University College London and recently was awarded the Centre for Process Analytics and Control Technology (CPACT) prize for recognition of her achievement in process analytics and control technologies. The prize recognises excellence in terms of scientific achievement, creative thinking and/or engagement between academia and industry. We have good reasons to be proud of these five people.

Delkor has operated under the TAKRAF Group banner since rebranding in October 2020, and has been represented at eight MEI Conferences in the past, sponsoring Precious Metals '10, and Flotation '13 as Tenova Delkor, an Italian company which also operates under the umbrella of the TAKRAF Group.

It was good to catch up with the representatives from sponsor Takraf-Delkor, the combined brand of the TAKRAF Group, a German industrial company specialising in heavy machinery and processing equipment for the mining and materials industries. 

Takraf's Klaus Schommarz (Namibia), George Jacob and Shiraz Hussain (South Africa)

During the lunch break I talked to the four delegates from Lihong Chem, a Chinese company at its first MEI Conference. They specialise in cellulose ethers and have a mining grade chemical for flotation applications as a gangue inhibitor or silicate suppressor.

Lunch break with Lihong Chem delegates

Enjoying lunch in the sun

The Vineyard Hotel is not a bad place to be marooned for a couple of days, but last night we relaxed at the Gold Restaurant in the city centre, where a surprise 80th birthday treat was provided for me!

The taxis have arrived

With Graeme Jameson and his grandson, Sam and my grandson, Will

All thoughts of flotation forgotten

Surprise, surprise!

#Flotation25

Monday at Flotation '25

MEI's Jon Wills opened Flotation '25 this morning, welcoming the first of the 400 delegates from 32 countries to MEI's biggest ever conference.

Chris Greet is a familiar face at MEI's flotation and comminution conferences. He is Manager Minerals Processing Research at Magotteaux, Australia and leads their technical efforts investigating the effect of grinding chemistry on downstream processes. Opening the conference, in his keynote lecture he discussed the methods employed for selecting media for use in regrind mills, and provided some insights into the pulp chemistry of the slurries leaving these mills and how this affects the flotation response. He looked at solutions for restoring the pulp chemistry and improving flotation performance.  This was followed by presentations on working circuits. There will be a summary of all technical session presentations in a few weeks' time.

Due to the high numbers, the satellite room proved popular, where presentations from the main conference room were streamed and opposite this room was the display of 92 posters, which attracted much interest during the long breaks, as did the 30 exhibition booths (see YouTube video).

Conference sponsor Metcelerate is a specialist training and professional-development organisation focused on the mining and minerals processing sector. They offer a multi-course training programme for early-career mineral-processing engineers. I was pleased to drop by their booth, manned by Jenny Weise and Jan Cilliers, and to congratulate Jan, Professor of Minerals Processing at Imperial College, London as the 2025 recipient of the American Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration's (SME) Antoine Gaudin Award for scientific or engineering contributions that further understanding of the technology of mineral processing.  

Jan is one of seven winners of the award at the conference, with Peter Amelunxen (2023), Cyril O'Connor (2022), Kevin Galvin (2017), Osvaldo Bascur (2013), Graeme Jameson (2012) and Jim Finch (1997). I managed to catch up with four of these award winners at last night's welcoming function, and hope to get the other three together during the week.

Gaudin Award winners Jim Finch, Jan Cilliers, Kevin Galvin and Osvaldo Bascur

Lunch break: the MEI team with University of South Australia students

One of Prof. Graeme Jameson's inventions, the Concorde Cell, is licensed to international company Metso, represented by a team of 17 at the conference. They are long-time MEI sponsors including Comminution '27 and they were the first of our twenty four sponsors to sign up for sponsorship of Flotation '27. In the photo below Jon shakes hands-on the deal with Charles Ntsele, Vice- President of Mneral Sales and marketeer Chantel Fourie.

An excellent first day ended in the evening sunshine for the first of our sundowners in the hotel gardens, where we were joined by a welcome guest, Prof. Aubrey Mainza, from nearby University of Cape Town. Aubrey is MEI consultant to Comminution '27 and is Chairman of next year's International Mineral Processing Congress in Cape Town, where MEI will be represented as media partners.

The MEI team with Aubrey Mainza

#Flotation25

Sunday in Cape Town

On a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, the day got off to an early start with a whole day course from Prof. Liza Forbes, of JKMRC, Australia, on Flotation Chemistry: Fundamentals and Practice. With an attendance of around 25, it was good to see so many students on the course from the University of Cape Town. and from Australia's ARC Centres for Excellence.

The course was followed by a short workshop from conference sponsor Glencore Technology on The Evolution of the Jameson Cell: Smarter Designs, Broader Applications, presented by Ryan Jones and Adam Price and attended by around 75 delegates.

All leading up to the late afternoon reception, where we welcomed the first of our 400 delegates from 32 countries to Flotation '25.

#Flotation25

The MEI Team Arrives in Cape Town

The MEI team is now safely in Cape Town, joined by an additional member, Amanda’s elder son, Will, who is spending a week with us on work experience as he considers becoming the next-generation partner in MEI.

Barbara and I arrived at midday on Friday after a surprisingly seamless rail journey from Falmouth to Heathrow, followed by the late-evening BA flight to Cape Town International (CTI).

Will caught the early-evening flight on Friday, having landed at Heathrow just three hours earlier after his holiday in Thailand. He should have been accompanied by Amanda, but travelling from Cornwall is rarely straightforward; after a gruelling ten-hour coach journey to the airport, she missed the flight. Fortunately, she managed to transfer to the later one and arrived at CTI yesterday lunchtime, around the same time as Jon, who arrived from Luxembourg via Istanbul on Turkish Airlines.

Now settled into the Vineyard Hotel, we enjoyed drinks together last night at the Waterfront, at the Ferrymans, followed by dinner at the Harbour House restaurant. We are now all set to welcome the first of our 400 delegates to Flotation '25 today.

FLS is the latest sponsor of Comminution '27

Although a year and a half away, Comminution '27 has got off to a flying start, with 17 sponsors already on board.

The latest sponsor, FLS, is also a sponsor of next week's Flotation '25, and one of our most regular supporters over many years.

FLS at Comminution '25

FLS has positioned itself strongly in the comminution space, especially in technologies that deliver energy savings and reduced grinding media.

We can expect to hear much about developments in high pressure grinding rolls (HPGR) at the conference. HPGRs are among the most energy-efficient comminution technologies (in particular less grinding media, lower power consumption) and FLS has secured an order for two of the world’s largest HPGRs (3.0 m diameter × 2.0 m width) for a new iron-ore concentrator in India, with installation and commissioning expected in 2026. With this order FLS reports 15 HPGR orders or commitments in 2024. 

Also in 2024 FLS secured an order to deliver a dry grinding solution for an iron-ore pellet plant in Oman. This included two dry grinding mills, a wet grinding ball mill, high-efficiency air-separators, hydrocyclones and pumps, the focus being on reduced water usage in a water-stressed region. The company already have 80+ sites with over 150 dry grinding mills/air separators on various ores. 

Reduction of energy and water will feature heavily at Comminution '27, and we expect to hear more of reducing loads on comminution circuits via pre-concentration, particular as Steinert, a leading player in sensor-based sorting, is one of the 17 sponsors.

#Comminution27

Circular hydrometallurgy approaches towards more sustainable processing of critical minerals

Circular hydrometallurgy is an emerging approach in metal extraction and recovery that applies circular economy principles (reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover) to traditional hydrometallurgical processes. It is a sustainable, closed-loop approach to metal recovery that turns waste into a resource, integrating hydrometallurgical science with circular economy thinking.

Circular hydrometallurgy is becoming a cornerstone perspective for extractive metallurgical processes, and in particular for the processing of critical minerals, and their associated metals and materials. In a keynote lecture at Critical Minerals '26, Jacques Eksteen, a Professor in the WA School of Mines, at Curtin University, Australia, will review examples in the development of novel processes for some critical minerals essential in the Energy Transition, such as nickel, cobalt and copper, and associated precious metals such as PGMs, gold and silver. 

The Energy Transition towards cleaner forms of non-fossil energy requires a complete rethink as to how we design our processes from the perspectives of energy utilisation, the use of benign reagents, the recycling and reuse of reagents and water, and valorisation of traditional waste products. The circularity around waste products, water and reagents reuse will be emphasised, while still ensuring economic feasibility.

Prof. Eksteen will provide examples where amino acids have been used in hydrometallurgical pathways to extract and refine a variety of critical metals from their ores, tailings, concentrates and from various technospheric (i.e. human-derived) waste materials. This will be an interesting precurser to the keynote lecture from Prof. Chun-Xia Zhao. who will show how her team at the University of Adelaide are developing designer peptides, short chains of amino acids, tailored for specific mineral binding and flotation applications.

Jacques Eksteen is the Manager of the Critical Minerals Metals and Materials for the Energy Transition research group at Curtin University. He is also the Interim Research Director for the Critical Metals for Critical Industries CRC. In addition, he was the Program Lead for Technology Readiness Level Progression in the Critical Minerals and Resources Technology Trailblazer, and held the roles Chief Scientist, Chief Operating Officer, and Research Director  of the Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre Ltd. He was Director of the Gold Technology Group and project manager of the AMIRA 420 project from 2012 to 2019. Jacques holds a PhD in Extractive Metallurgical Engineering and has 32 years of experience in industry and academia. He has published over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings and is a listed inventor on 10 patent families.

#CriticalMinerals26