Newcrest technology step change

ABSTRACT

Newcrest has a strong history of growth over the past 20 years, yielding value from previously marginal ore bodies. We have grown regionally in Asia Pacific through our operations in Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and also established a beachhead in West Africa. The company has a reputation of realizing value from large, low-grade deposits adopting step change approaches.

Newcrest is focused on an overall strategy of gold, low cost, long life and moderate growth. Capability step changes play a large delivery role. They transition from a business offline-to-online approach as opportunities mature. Newcrest believes in

a) Knowing what ‘good’ looks like,

b) An open innovation approach to actively working with others,

c) The leap frogging leverage of making the ‘old new again’,

d) An adopt-adapt-develop methodology enabled by rapid prototyping/piloting,

e) Getting our hands dirty with test work and plant analysis, and

f) Staying focused on a few high business leverage areas.

This paper describes Newcrest’s approach and our experiences in establishing renewed metallurgical processes, specifically aimed at increasing innovation adoption. Some of our step changes discussed include:

1) Early waste rejection to avoid high energy processing downstream,

2) Broader gold product channels to reduce site based processing needs,

3) Lower energy processing, and

4) Geo-Metallurgy approaches.

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