In news from Canada, CEEC commends the successful online delivery of the annual Canadian Mineral Processors’ Conference in Canada, January 2021, a first for the team.
Industry and research leaders and practitioners presented on the following topics:
- Quebec Iron Ore’s Bloom Lake iron ore mine - the significant plant flowsheet changes helping the restart to achieve new production records and improved recovery
- Agnico Eagle’s LaRonde gold and polymetallic mine and concentrator
- Glencore Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations’ Strathcona mill with flexible flow sheet to enable multiple feed processing
- St-Barbara Limited Atlantic Gold’s Touquoy gold mine commissioning and ramp up reaching high mill availability and future expansion plans, and rapid implementation of other projects
- Hudbay Minerals Inc.’s Snow Lake concentrator and mill, processing ore from the Lalor Mine
- Presentations on nickel recovery from slimes streams, lifter wear prediction, geometallurgy, preventative maintenance and remote monitoring
- The growth in important comminution machine learning techniques, including evolution of data-based, fault detection and image classification techniques, gaps, and future research needs
- Development and process design of The First Cobalt Refinery in Ontario, aiming to produce Canada domestic EV battery-grade cobalt sulphate
- Energy usage and carbon dioxide emissions from comminution
- A roadmap for evaluating coarse particle flotation for projects - process to consider options, including screening of ore candidates, lab, and pilot test, and applying results to flowsheet design
Masterclasses were held on:
- De-constraining underperforming circuits, on identifying the issues, and a systematic approach for optimization across asset disciplines to achieve productivity goals
- Mill liner selection and optimization to reduce relining and enhance productivity, including what to measure, how to account for liner mass loss, and advanced liner design for productivity
- Brownfield plant optimization economics, including economic levers for operating plants and a live modelling exercise to assess scenarios, including water, downtime, and productivity impacts
Panels were held on:
- The Future of the CMP - Have Recent Virtual Trends Changed Conferences Forever?
- The Co-Evolution of Operators and Suppliers
- The Most Commonly Encountered Implementation Questions from Real-World Ore Sorting Projects
Student posters included work on gravity separation, carbon capture and storage in ultramafic ore processing and MIBC dosage in flotation.
For more information: A full list of presenters, panelists, master class course speakers, and presentation abstracts is available at the time of publication of this CEEC news item at the CMP 2021 event link here.
Sincere thanks to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., the event committee members, CIM and CMP society and all authors, presenters, and participants for this excellent event, providing important updates and professional development in comminution and processing developments.