News

New General Manager Position for Maelgwyn Mineral Services Africa

Maelgwyn Mineral Services Africa (MMSA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr John Batty to the position of General Manager. John is already very well known and respected in bioleaching circles and started his involvement with bioleaching early on in his career when he was responsible for the commissioning of the world’s first commercial BIOX® plant at Fairview Mine in Barberton. John later lead the team that developed the scale-up and design of the world’s first commercial scale thermophile BioCOP™ plant at Chuquicamata in Chile for the treatment of Chalcopyrite concentrates. John has also worked extensively on bio heap leaching and is the inventor or co-inventor of numerous patents in this field. John is also knowledgeable in pressure leaching having worked in Brazil at the São Bento operation.

John’s experience is not limited to bioleaching of gold and base metal ores as he has also worked on process design, flowsheet development, mineral sands, manganese ore beneficiation, electrolytic manganese production, arsenic purification from flue dusts, diamond exploration techniques and biodiesel production from crops grown on disturbed land. He has also worked on re-mediation technologies and was responsible for the group that looked after BHP Billiton’s remediation efforts with a particular emphasis on AMD treatment and carbon sequestration.

John’s appointment follows closely on the heels of the appointment in August of world renowned cyanide expert Peter Lotz and further demonstrates Maelgwyn’s ongoing support of its expanding flotation, refractory gold and cyanide destruction technologies.

New Imhoflot G-Cell G28 for Votorantim Metals in Brazil

MMS through its Chilean based agent – Ingenieria de Minerales recently delivered a Imhoflot G-Cell plant incorporating a 2.8m G-Cell to the Vazantes zinc mine operated by Votorantim Metals in Brazil. Following successful pilot plant tests on different plant streams Votorantim placed a first order on MMS/IDM for a new flotation plant for carbonate flotation. This plant represents the first expansion stage with further upgrades planned. With the new Imhoflot flotation plant Votorantim is now able to float carbonates out of the plant tailings to achieve a saleable product for the fertilizer industry. Additionally through this reverse flotation process the carbonate float tailings are also upgraded in Zinc resulting in an additional 5% overall increase in overall Zinc recovery.

The nominal throughput in this first expansion stage is 260m³/h but the G28-cell has been shown to successfully operate at throughputs of up to 350 m³/h.

Commissioning of the cell went very smoothly taking only 1 week before being handed over to the client on the 3rd of September.

Cyanide Destruction Expert Joins Maelgwyn Minerals

Over the past year, since receiving the first order for its newly patented cyanide destruction process from Randgold Resources Tongon mine, Maelgwyn Minerals has been experiencing phenomenal market interest in this development. Several projects are now at a very advanced stage following on from earlier lab test work. This increased market demand has therefore necessitated Maelgwyn to further strengthen its management team with the appointment of world renowned cyanide expert Peter Lotz to Maelgwyn Mineral Services Africa.

Peter is already well known from his previous position at Mintek where he was head of process and environment, with his areas of expertise including gold leaching technology, cyanide management (including cyanide mass balancing, destruction and analytical methodologies) as well as general mining related sustainability issues. He is listed as an ICMI cyanide management code auditor and actively participated in the codes development.

Peter joins an experienced worldwide team which already includes leading cyanide experts such as Dr Mike Adams who is based in Perth and responsible for developing the CN-D process within the Australasian region through Maelgwyn Mineral Services Australia.

It is anticipated that Peter will work very closely with clients not just to optimize their Maelgwyn CN-D processes, but also to take a more holistic view of their plant processes including CN-D in terms of overall cyanide and water management.

The Maelgwyn CN-D process allows for cyanide destruction to below cyanide code requirements at a fraction of the cost of competing processes. Over and above this, the process also acts as a “policeman” to recover both dissolved and undissolved gold where the preceding dissolution and adsorption circuits have not been fully optimized.

MMS G-Cell Pilot Plant Successfully Recovers Nickel Fines

A three 1.2m diameter Hybrid G-Cell Pilot Plant has recently completed a successful testwork program at a nickel/ copper mine in Europe.The 28m3 /hr Pilot Plant which integrates both vertical and tangential feed options, achieved nickel recoveries of up to 67% from the existing plants’ final tails.

Recoveries had been limited by the inability of the flotation plants’ existing tank cells to recover the nickel present as ultra fines. Previous QEMSCAN analysis of plant tailings had indicated that significant losses of nickel sulphides were occurring to the minus 9 micron fraction. The Imhoflot G-Cells using their ultra fine bubble technology and high energy contact reactor clearly illustrated their advantage in this size range over conventional flotation in recovering the extra metal. Further pilot work is planned to determine the economics of a possible circuit configuration change.

Maelgwyn at GDMB Flotation Workshop-Spain

GDMB, the German association for mining, metallurgy and environment annually arrange a flotation workshop. This year’s workshop was arranged by Maelgwyn Minerals Dr Rainer Imhof who has been heading up the GDMB flotation group and arranging group visits for the past 20 years. The flotation group represents a wide range of interests from university academics through to operational plant management with the aim of promoting dialogue on flotation topics .This year’s workshop was held in May in Granada, Spain with the usual full agenda.

The first day’s presentations covered a wide range of topics including potash flotation at Belaruskali where Maelgwyn’s V cells are installed and Imhoflot nickel flotation testwork using Imhoflot G- cells at Aquablanca, Spain to recover fines present in the rougher tailings stream not recovered through tank flotation.

The second day’s activities were more practically focused with the group visiting Solway Minerals strontium flotation operation at Escuzar – close to Granada where several stages of cleaning are required to achieve a high coelestine concentrate grade. All of the tour participants found it very interesting and would like to thank Solway Minerals for hosting them.

Further details on GDMB activities can be obtained from Dr Imhof.

Delegates at GDMB flotation workshop during plant visit to Solway Minerals Escuzar strontium flotation operation

Maelgwyn Minerals Services (MMS) Conference

Maelgwyn Minerals Services (MMS) recently completed a very successful 3 day conference for its stakeholder metallurgists held at the MMS UK office in Cardiff. This was now the 2nd conference following on from the inaugural conference held last year in South Africa and now looks like becoming firmly entrenched as an annual event. The objective of the conference was to exchange information, experiences and ideas on the group’s proprietary minerals processing technology. Present were representatives of MMS companies in the UK, Germany, South Africa, Russia and Australia. Mr Peter Lotz of Mintek also joined the last day of the conference along with Professors Anthony Griffiths and Keith Williams of Cardiff University to discuss cyanide destruction.

Standing from left to right are Rainer Imhof, Laure Gouguet, Derryth Young, Alexander Bakulin, Heiner Sprenger, Hennie Stallknecht, Peter Lotz, Mike Adams, Mark Battersby, Mike Battersby, Steve Flatman

TŶ Maelgwyn - New Headquarters for MMS

MMS are now firmly established in their new headquarters on Gower Street in Cardiff. The building has been purchased by a pension fund related to MMS and has been renamed Tŷ Maelgwyn (Maelgwyn House). The offices are situated in the Cathays area of Cardiff near the heart of the University and Civic Centre. The 250sq.m of office space offers plenty of room to expand for the rapidly growing company. Whilst the offices are completely modern the original building was a former coach house and stables. Some of the old feature walls of the stables still remain. The offices are accessed through an archway and courtyard from Gower Street.

Maelgwyn CN-D™ Cyanide Destruction Process for West Africa

MMSA is pleased to announce the first commercial application of its CN-D cyanide destruction process at Randgold Resources new 300000tpm Tongon Gold Mine in Cote d’Ivoire West Africa is due for commissioning in the last quarter of 2010. As the Tongon ore is refractory it will also be treated using Maelgwyn’s Leachox™ process to treat a flotation concentrate and tails.

The Maelgwyn CN-D™ process was selected after an intensive testwork program and is able to reduce the weak acid dissociable cyanide to less than 0.5ppm in the residue which is low enough to be discharged to the environment.

In the CN-D Process free and WAD cyanide are oxidised by Aachen reactors using oxygen and activated carbon at specific Eh and pH values .The optional use of a metal catalyst can further reduce cyanide levels. Apart from its inherent simplicity the process by utilising activated carbon has the added advantage of acting as a “policeman” or safety net to further reduce any residual soluble loss of gold. The Aachen reactors are also able to drive leach kinetics using the remaining residual cyanide prior to destruction to dissolve additional gold .This combined gold from additional dissolution and adsorption can provide a credit which at times can cover the entire cost of the CN-D process and contribute towards reducing overall operating costs.

Tongon plant under construction

Precious Metals 10 Conference in Cornwall

A number of delegates from MMS recently attended the Precious Metals 10 Conference in Cornwall, UK. MMS General Manager Steve Flatman delivered a paper on the Maelgwyn Leachox process entitled "The Leachox™Refractory Gold Process-The Testing, Design Installation and Commissioning of a Large Scale Plant at the VASGOLD Gold Mine, Kazakhstan". The paper was very well received and promoted a great deal of discussion.
In addition MMS were also a conference sponsor and had a stand.

MMS General Manager Steve Flatman delivering presenting paper on leachox at Precious Metals 10 Conference