How Maelgwyn’s “Golden Bubbles” Leachox Refractory Gold Process Contributed to the Addition of over One Billion Dollars to the Bottom Line of One of the World’s Best Mining Companies.

It’s not often that one can praise the foresight and management of a gold mining company when it comes to innovation and new technology introduction, especially in the area of mineral processing. Normally, as is our experience, most are very blinkered to such concepts and tend to focus on promotion activities in an effort to raise the company share price, rather than on actual operations and activities like increasing production and reducing costs and looking after the various stakeholders’ interests.

So, it was refreshing to find a mining company that thought out of the box. To its eternal benefit Maelgwyn found such a company back in 2009 and it will be of no surprise to anyone involved in mining to hear that the company was Africa focused gold mining company Randgold Resources.

Randgold, with its leader, CEO Mark Bristow was the darling of the mining industry for a decade until its merger with and into Barrick Gold Corporation in 2019.  Mr Bristow now leads the new Barrick into the future and has taken the best practices established at Randgold with him.

Randgold was recognised as being at the forefront of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues way before it became fashionable in the mining industry. Its support to countries, the environment and the local population where it operates has been exemplary.  It’s advanced practices’ in exploration geology and mine planning are well known in the industry.  But less well known is its embracement of new technology and concepts in the way gold ore is processed.

It all started back in 2009.  Randgold were already operating a number of gold mines in Africa and had discovered or acquired what would become world class gold deposits at Tongon in the Ivory Coast and Kibali in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The problem with these deposits, like most in west and central Africa, was that they had refractory components to some degree. This made the processing of such ores for gold recovery difficult by conventional means or requiring very high capital cost associated with advanced processing methods of pressure oxidation or bacterial leaching.

By this time Maelgwyn had developed and patented world-wide its Leachox process;

“Extraction Process for Metals like Gold and Platinum including Fine Grinding, Pulping and Oxygenating”

The process involves the also patented Maelgwyn Aachen Reactor combined with ultra-fine grinding and the leaching of concentrates.  Maelgwyn had previous success with the process at a number of gold operations treating refractory gold ore and Randgold wanted to investigate the technology and processes.  So, it installed a number of Aachen Reactors at its existing Loulo gold operation in Mali, essentially to undertake due diligence on the technology.  Loulo ore was not particularly refractory but the Aachen Reactors immediately and dramatically increased the dissolved oxygen levels in the process (required for gold leaching), reduced reagent consumption and importantly increased gold recovery.  We made this amateur “home movie” at the time of the Loulo operation. It’s not the most riveting movie but of interest near the end of the film is the jump in dissolved oxygen levels in the leach tanks from below 2ppm to 28ppm when the Reactor was put on-line.

 https://youtu.be/KfYehwOJvEo

After months of operation of the Aachen Reactors to prove reliability Randgold was convinced of the process and worked with Maelgwyn and its metallurgical laboratories to come up with a workable process concept for its Tongon and Kibali projects. Both process plants for these projects were designed around the Leachox process. 

Kibali is considered one of the “Tier One” gold operation in the world producing nearly a million ounces of gold annually. As with most gold ore deposits Kibali consisted of a covering of weathered oxide ore, underlaid be a layer of transition ore. Essentially transition ore is a mix of weathered and primary un-weathered ore or any combination in between. Not necessarily a major component of the orebody but difficult to process. Under the transition ore was the primary sulphide ore. This primary ore was the majority of the orebody and refractory in nature.

Randgold designed the process flowsheet for Kibali to first treat the oxide ore by a conventional Carbon in Pulp method with Aachen Reactors installed to increase dissolved oxygen levels, negate cyanide consuming species in the ore and maintain a higher level of gold recovery. When transition ore was introduced the Reactors had to work harder to maintain maximum recovery.  However, the plant was designed to be able to treat the majority of the orebody in a separate circuit where the gold was contained in refractory sulphides. To this end a flotation plant and concentrate ultra-fine grind circuit was installed prior to the Aachen Reactors. Combined with ultra-fine grinding the Reactors partially oxidized the sulphides thus liberating gold particles to be leached. The Aachen Reactors also negate passivation to also assist the gold leaching process.  Finally, Aachen Reactors were also installed in combination with the Air/SO2 cyanide destruction process to make the plant tailings safe for depositing in the tailings dam.  In all there were 18 Aachen Reactors installed at Kibali. Eventually Aachen Reactors were installed or retrofitted into all Randgold’s operations.

Mark Bristow, CEO of Randgold and now CEO of Barrick Gold is reputed to have referred to the Leachox process and the Aachen Reactors as the “Golden Bubbles”.  We believe we certainly contributed to the success of Randgold.  We estimate that across all Randgold Resources operations since the Reactors have been installed, they have been responsible for well over one billion dollars in extra revenue for Randgold.  This figure is obviously only a guestimate on our part as most detailed production data of the various mines is confidential. It was estimated on officially released production figures over the time period, results from initial metallurgical testwork and operating plant data where it has been provided to us and then average gold prices. We think this estimate is conservative and does not include the considerable operating cost savings in reduced reagent usage caused by the reactors.

The licence and supply of Aachen Reactors to the client means that they are monitored and maintained by Maelgwyn in a continuous good working order.  This, with the continued support by the Maelgwyn technical team, including metallurgical laboratory development and process trouble-shooting services to the whole operations means that the excellent working partnership between Maelgwyn and Barrick Gold has continued into this next decade.

History of the Development of the Aachen Reactor

 The Aachen Reactor, a highly efficient mass transfer device, is now firmly established as a key processing step in many gold operations with many millions of ounces of gold recovered annually via the reactor.  It is the key technology to a number of innovative processes including the Leachox refractory gold process.

The development of the Maelgwyn Mineral Services (MMS) Aachen Reactor can be traced back to 1987. Interestingly and separately to completely opposite parts of the world.  In 1987 Michael Battersby, Co-founder of MMS with Dr Rainer Imhof, had emigrated from the UK to Australia and was working as metallurgical manager of a mine management company in the historic mining centre of Kalgoorlie.  A part of his work was to provide metallurgical consultancy to a number of operating gold mines in the area.  One of which was the Broad Arrow Gold Mine, about 40km north of Kalgoorlie. Mike had recruited a young metallurgist – Ivan Mullany – to be the plant metallurgist at Broad Arrow. A decade later Ivan was going to be very influential to the success of MMS.

The Broad Arrow Gold Mine was a small Carbon in Pulp operation that ran for a number of years and then, as reserves were depleted, it was eventually closed down and the plant dismantled.  The process plant was a few hundred metres from the famous Broad Arrow Tavern. An outback tavern made of corrugated sheets.  Mike and Ivan, with many other mine workers in the area, used to regularly stop off in the pub after work on the way back to town for a pie and some refreshment.  Mike still has the T-shirt! A bit worn now.

Broad Arrow Tavern T-shirt!

 In the pub, like all good metallurgists, the talk was about how to improve the gold recoveries on the plant.  The Broad Arrow ore was free milling and generally gave good overall gold recoveries – in the 90% - 95% range. But improvements could be made. Although free milling, the ore did have appreciable amounts of clay which made the pulp quite viscous. To add to this, the bore water in this region is renowned for having high levels of total dissolved salts (TDS). In the case of Broad Arrow up to 200,000 mg/L. This high TDS buffered the water making it quite difficult and costly to raise the pH to the high levels wanted for correct and safe operation.

To briefly recap the gold leaching process. To dissolve the gold, you need cyanide in the presence of oxygen with a high alkaline pH for safety to avoid the formation of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) poisonous gas. At Broad Arrow the oxygen came from a supply of compressed air that was blown into the tanks. The combination of the pulp viscosity and buffering made this quite inefficient. The dissolved oxygen (DO) levels required in the pulp were only barely reached and you go visually see the inefficiencies with large air bubbles rising to the surface and escaping to the atmosphere. So, the talk in the pub between Mike and Ivan was, occasionally, how could the oxygen utilisation be improved. It was actually an issue on most gold plants world-wide.

Around the same time in 1987 in Germany Dr Rainer Imhof was inventing and developing various pneumatic flotation systems.  He had come up with a gas dispersion and pressure hold-up concept and on the 10^th of December 1987 had duly applied for a German patent on the invention.

 

Dr Imhof’s gas dispersion and pressure hold up patent.

 Moving on to 1992 and Mike had joined the same company as Dr Imhof, although as Technical Sales Manager in Australia whist Dr Imhof was based in Germany.  Mike was now marketing the flotation technology developed by Dr Imhof.  Ivan Mullany had moved on to plant superintendent at the Emperor gold mine in Fiji. The mine had decided to test one of Dr Imhof’s pilot flotation cells at the mine. The tests were proceeding nicely but Ivan, who was having similar low dissolved oxygen levels at Emperor that were encountered at Broad Arrow, asked Mike if he could test the aerator that came with the pilot pneumatic flotation cell to see if it could increase the DO levels.  The answer that came back for the head office in Germany was a firm no.  Mike suggested to Ivan that he just run such a test over a weekend period when the German engineer, who was operating the pilot plant, was having his well-earned weekend break at the lovely beaches that Fiji has to offer.  This Ivan duly did and ran over the weekend, dismantling things and putting it back on the pilot plant before the German engineer arrived back at the mine. He didn’t notice a thing. On the plant the DO levels in the tanks doubled during the test and, as far as could be measured, it was thought that the gold recoveries had increased a few percentage points in that weekend period. A few percentage points increase in recovery is a considerable amount of extra revenue for a gold mine.

Mike and Rainer finally met when Rainer came out to Australia to attend the International Mineral Processing Congress in Sydney in 1993. They got on well and Mike explained what he had been doing and thinking about with Rainer’s aerators, for gold leaching.  Rainer went back to Germany and thought about the idea. In the meantime, Mike had been in discussions with various industry leaders in Australia about the concept. One of whom was Rob Dunne. He had arranged for trials of the flotation aerator to be undertaken at the New Celebration gold mine and the large Boddington gold mine in Western Australia.  Technically the trials were a success indicating an increase in DO levels, and increase in gold recovery and a decrease in cyanide consumption. Some of the work was actually reported in a technical paper.  However, the flotation aerators used were designed for low wear, batch flotation tests and not designed for continuous operation and the high wear rigours of gold ore slurries. A major redesign was required.

Some of the original designed pneumatic flotation aerators.

In 1994 Mike was then asked to move to Germany to head up the High Pressure Grinding Rolls division of the company. Here he worked a lot closer with Dr Imhof who was perfecting his new designs of an aerator that could be used in the gold industry.  Mike had quick success with the HPGR’s, essentially breaking their entry and use into mainstream metalliferous mining. He then went to the managers of the company with Dr Imhof’s new designs and a new business concept for the company in gold processing.  However, the company was not interested. There was a lot of internal company politics going on at that time and they also could not grasp that the industry was moving away for turn-key mineral processing plants, that had been their lifeblood for decades, to EPCM style contracts where engineering companies picked and chose what and whose equipment would be installed, mainly based on price.

In 1997 Mike decided that the had enough of working for a large multinational.  With Rainer’s new designs he believed he could develop a business concept that would support a new company.  He resigned, moved to Wales and on 21^st October 1997 registered Maelgwyn Mineral Services Ltd. The move and start up was a little bit more planned than random.  By this time Ivan Mullany was now manager at the Mines d'Or de Salsigne gold mine in the south of France.  Low and behold Salsigne was having the same old trouble with low dissolved oxygen levels.  Only at Salsigne it was amplified by the presence of sulphides in the ore that chewed up the various reagents used in gold leaching. As is seen later, this is a recurring theme globally.  Ivan had been asking for a while for Mike’s previous company to supply an aerator, as has been said, without success.  On the date of MMS’s registration, it received its first order for an Aachen Reactor REA200 from Ivan at Salsigne. Ivan Mullany has had a very successful career with two of the biggest gold mining companies – Barrick Gold Corp and currently Newmont Gold Corp, where he is Senior Vice-President – Projects.

 

Mark I Aachen Reactor Assembly

Dissolved Oxygen levels being measured in the tank after the Aachen Reactor in Salsigne, France

 

The order from Mines d'Or de Salsigne was quickly followed by and order from old friends at the Emperor gold mine in Fiji and then from Kanowna Belle gold mine in Australia.

 Development of the reactor at this time went into overdrive with Dr Imhof working on designs and concepts that would both increase the efficiency of the reactor and decrease wear to extend the units life.  Initially it was called an aerator but it was quickly realised that it was more of a reactor than an aerator.  It’s called the Aachen Reactor.  Most people think, with Mike and Rainer being based in Germany at the start of its concept, that is has something to do with the historic city of Aachen in Germany, close to the Belgium and Dutch borders.  In fact, it has nothing to do with the place Aachen.  At that time in the 1990’s the internet was not the thing it is now. Most information was still supplied “hard copy” such as product directories. It was simply that MMS wanted the aerator to appear first in any product listing and “Aa” Aachen got you that spot.  The “Aardvark Aerator” was seriously considered!

In the year 2000 Dr Imhof acquired the ownership rights of his own patents, where he was the inventor, from his previous company. He then vended them into MMS and joined Mike full-time. This was the catalyst for the expansion of the use of the reactors.  MMS had set up a subsidiary in South Africa. This company was close to the market and uses of the reactor, so could get immediate feedback on various issues. This assisted Dr Imhof to design ever larger units with more efficient gas dispersion and, crucially, much improved wear characteristics.  Some of these developments and inventions were novel enough to obtain world-wide patent protection for the new designs and then the various processes developed around the reactor.

There are currently (2020) over eighty Aachen Reactors in operation world-wide in various processing applications and many more in the pipe-line, both literally and figuratively so to speak!

 

 A Current Aachen Reactor Installation

Rene I. B. Klymowsky RIP (26.07.44 - 04.03.12)

Rene I. B. Klymowsky  RIP (26.07.44  -  04.03.12)

Rene Klymowsky sadly passed away on the 4^th March at his home in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Rene was unbelievably passionate about minerals processing in over 45 years of working in the mining industry. His enthusiasm for his profession will be greatly missed. Rene was still working as hard as ever as Manager – Minerals for Polysius AG at Bockum, Germany at the time of his premature departure.

He was born in Germany but moved to Canada shortly after the end of the Second World War. He studied Metallurgical Engineering at McGill University in Montreal obtaining both B.Eng and M.Eng. His early working career saw him in operations for Noranda and Inco before spending 11 years with CANMET. During this time he became Chairman of the Canadian Iron Ore Committee.  In 1979 he moved to Europe and joined Billiton Research B.V. in Arnhem becoming Principal Scientist. At that time Billiton was the Metals Division of the Shell Company.  In 1994 he joined KHD Humboldt Wedag AG in Cologne and then in 2000 Polysius AG in Bockum. At both these companies he specialised in the processing aspects of High Pressure Grinding Rolls.

Rene was always at the forefront of mineral processing development. At his time with Billiton he was tasked with evaluating computer simulation programmes and thus became the first commercial user of JKSimMet and an expert in many other programmes such as MetSim and USIM-PAC. He was also briefed by Billition in the early eighties with evaluating a new technology – High Pressure Grinding.  After the sale of Billiton to Gencor Rene then worked with the two principal HPGR suppliers, becoming the eminent expert in the technology. He was largely responsible for their introduction into the minerals industry because he could clearly and succinctly explain and demonstrate on a technical basis to clients how the HPGR’s fitted into their comminution circuit and what the benefits were. 

Rene was a driven and passionate mineral processor, the typical “workaholic”. A slow starter in the mornings his brain would click into gear in the afternoons and then he would continue well into the night. When his working was reported to be drifting towards midnight his bosses would try and insist he work “regular hours”. He certainly was not “politically correct” by today’s standards and this got him into slight trouble now and again. He also didn’t suffer fools, especially in his profession.  As part of an equipment sales team he would regularly cross swords with consultants or company metallurgists who had to give the impression of knowing what they were talking about to their clients or bosses. Invariably, calmly and politely, Rene would point out or demonstrate the errors in their thoughts or calculations.

Rene is survived by his wife Susan and children James and Lily; and children Sophie and Christopher in Canada from a previous marriage.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Schonert (1927 – 2011) – The Loss of a Real Inventor

It was sad to hear the news that Klaus Schonert passed away on the 24^th September 2011. I doubt if any individual has contributed more to the advancement of comminution, energy savings and minerals processing over the last 40 years and maybe we will struggle to find someone to compare over the next 40 years. His patent ”Method of Fine and Very Fine Comminution of Materials Having Brittle Behavior” (US patent) is revolutionising the way we undertake size reduction and is now represented by the High Pressure Grinding Rolls (HPGR’s).

I had met personally with Klaus Schonert only about a dozen times but was always struck by the practicality of this Emeritus Professor. I first met Schonert briefly at the University of Clausthal at the end of the 1980’s whilst researching HPGR’s for Billiton. However my first real discussions with him were after I’d joined KHD, at the Sydney IMPC in 1993. To my astonishment and pleasure he spent many hours with me at the KHD exhibition stand where we discussed, amongst many things, how to get the HPGR’s (KHD’s Roller Press and Polysius’s POLYCOM) accepted into the minerals market. There had been an immediate and rapid uptake in the cement industry. The entry into the minerals market was more challenging, mainly due to the increased wear associated with wet metallic minerals.

Whilst in our profession of minerals processing we have been blessed with a number of highly acclaimed academics and researchers, who have contributed immensely to our understanding of fundamentals, few if any, have been able to produce something really practical and usable. Schonert was somebody who did this with the High Pressure Grinding Rolls.  From fundamental research into single particle breakage in the 1960’s through to inter-particle breakage in a particle bed in the 1970’s and his work with piston presses he noted, contrary to conventional wisdom, that much higher pressures increased the efficiency of breakage. Up to this time high pressures were avoided as they were thought to agglomerate the particles and thus have a negative effect on comminution and increase the energy requirements for size reduction.  For a full description of these developments see “The History of Grinding” by Alban Lynch and Chester Rowland (SME 2005) where Schonert himself describes these developments.

The fundamental research was impressive. However the genius was indentifying a way the concept could be transferred to a practical industrial method. Schonert identified that briquetting and compacting presses had the basic pre-requisites but were used for particle agglomeration, not comminution. These machines had been around for many decades. They consisted of two counter rotating rolls, either smooth for compaction into flakes or with a surface profile design for the manufacture of briquettes.  Generally the pressure applied to form the agglomerates was with metal springs. Next, he realised that no one had connected this with size reduction and it was therefore patentable. What followed in the next 10 years was the most intense patent litigation seen in our industry between licensees of the Schonert patents and those companies who had compacting technology and saw it as “obvious” that it could be now used for size reduction.

Schonert originally non-exclusively licenced his patents to Polysius, a German based equipment supply company. It’s interesting that Polysius did not have any prior briquetting/compaction technology and had to develop things from scratch. Their design applied the high pressures required by pistons against the bearing housing of one set of rolls. Soon after in 1979 KHD, another German based equipment supply company, who did have briquetting/compaction technology initiated opposition proceedings to Schonert’s German patents.  After much wrangling Schonert, Polysius and KHD agreed that KHD could also have a non-exclusive licence if it dropped its patent opposition. Also that both Polysius and KHD had a right of veto of any new licences and that Schonert, Polysius and KHD would work in collusion in enforcing the Schonert patents, with Polysius and KHD jointly sharing the cost of such enforcement.

This agreement to defend the intellectual property led to the most intense and complex litigation ever seen in the mineral processing equipment supply industry and is still referred to and studied in general patent case law today.  There were a few international litigation actions but the principle one was between Polysius and the Fuller Company of the USA. In this case Fuller (later being taken over by FLSmidth in 1990) was charged with patent infringement. It counter sued with a defence of “patent invalidity, patent misuse and fraud of the patent office”.  In addition, Fuller also counter claimed and sought damages for “alleged anti-trust and other unfair competition violations” in the USA.

The Pennsylvania District Court handed down its judgement on 3 February 1989, which was subsequently upheld in the United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit on 12 October 1989. The courts found in favour of Schonert and Polysius, upheld the validity of the patent and dismissed all anti-trust claims made by Fuller. The judgement and opinion of the courts makes excellent reading for anyone who has an interest in the technology or IP protection. The full transcript can be viewed in this link;

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?page=1&xmldoc=19891269709FSupp560_11164.xml&docbase=CSLWAR2-1986-2006&SizeDisp=7

The transcript is interesting as it records not only of the technicalities and legalities of the applied patent law but because it also details claims of industrial espionage and subdiffusion and also has many references to Taggart. Maybe it’s the good basis of a thriller film! 

The court case also highlights the enormity of the reputation of Professor Klaus Schonert. From the judge; 

“....no one except Schonert had the genius to combine the separate elements into the teaching of the ‘287 patent”.

“The most telling objective indicator.... is that the Fuller engineers, when they heard of that “German professor”, did not go to Taggart or any other prior art cited by Fuller in this case. Instead Fuller’s engineer went directly to that “German professor”.

The judge also made much of Schonert’s  Gaudin award from the SME.

“I am convinced that Schonert’s peers placed him on a high pedestal for the invention of the process“.

“Schonert is a scholar of high repute”.

“I find that Schonert is a scholar of the first order (and) that his testimony is highly credible”.

This is high praise not normally dished out by a high court judge in judgement!

I guess that Schonert was tied in by Polysius and KHD with the licence because you would expect it to be more beneficial to him to have more licensees. But I know he didn’t do too badly out of his patents. In German law the IP/Patent rights reside with the inventor/academic, not with the university as his employer. During my time at KHD in the 1990’s I was tasked with checking the annual calculation of sales of the Roller Press and Schonert’s 3% licence fee. It was not an inconsiderable amount. Bear in mind that also Polysius were selling a similar amount of HPGR’s.  I understand though that Schonert gifted much to the university to fund departments and research.

Despite having such an involvement with HPGR’s  it was about 25 years after the event it suddenly dawned on me about my first encounter. In the early 80’s during my graduate training with Anglo American Corporation in South Africa I spent some months with De Beers. One of my boring tasks for a few weeks was to do sieve screen size analysis. I remember that the labels referred to something like piston press samples. I did not know at the time that De Beers were investigating Schonert’s work for the liberation of diamonds from kimberlite without breakage. Subsequently De Beers installed the first four HPGR’s in the minerals industry at Premier Diamond Mine.

Small world!

The Value of Patents in Mineral Processing

Patents and intellectual property rights seem to have dominated our thoughts at MMS in the last few weeks. We have recently been in the Court of the European Patent Office in Munich to successfully defend a submission by a competitor to cancel our granted Imhoflot pneumatic flotation patent on the grounds of prior art.

Then, to our good fortune, the current British government coalition confirmed plans in the budget last week to introduce a preferential regime for profits arising from patents. To be known as a “Patent Box” the intention is to introduce a 10% corporation tax rate on profits arising from patents from 1 April 2013. It is hoped that the Patent Box will encourage international companies to locate high value jobs and activities associated with the development and exploitation of patents to the UK. Next year’s UK corporation tax rates will be 26% for companies with profits above £300k and 20% on amounts below that figure. There are already a few countries that offer a similar system of domiciled companies – The Nederland’s and Spain are two examples.  As just about all MMS’s revenue and profits can be attributed to our patents this is very welcome news for us.

So, assuming it does work out and we are still profitable, we will finally see a tangible return on all our efforts. This will be good, because the money we spend on developing, applying for and maintaining patents is quite a considerable amount of our non operating expenses. After so many years of maintaining patents you do question their value.

On a purely self satisfaction basis the 17^th March 2011 will go down as one of the better days for MMS. We had been summoned to the Opposition Court of the European Patent Office in Munich to defend our granted Imhoflot pneumatic flotation patent against a claim of prior art by our competitor, KHD Humboldt Wedag.  MMS won a glorious victory! The court found in favour of MMS and the Imhoflot patent and declared all our patent Claims both novel and inventive.  The court dismissed all allegations of prior art by KHD. Each Claim for both points of novel and then inventive where attacked by the opposition patent attorneys and expert witnesses and then defended by our attorney with expert witness coming from the inventor, Dr Rainer Imhof. There was simultaneous translation of English and German. We then all had to leave the room for each decision for the court to deliberate (chairman, technical patent examiners and legal counsel). The chairman then read out the verdict and we moved on to the next Claim for deliberation. Actually waiting for the verdict was as nerve racking as I would have thought it was like at a murder trial; guilty – not guilty! When all the decisions started going in our favour the opposition attorneys then tried a few legal tricks. The best way I can describe it is as entrapment, where they got us to verbally declare something, then claimed to the court non disclosure of method. Luckily the court was having none of it. Apparently these sort of challenges to granted patents are rare. However going through the process has certainly given us the best experience in knowing how to frame future patent applications. I have to say that the opposition attorneys did themselves no favours by “challenging” the decisions of the court when they were going against them. For those who remember, think of John McEnroe in his early days at the tennis – “you cannot be serious!”  Thanks must go to our excellent patent attorney, Michael Spencer of Bromhead Johnson in London. Michael has been our patent legal advisor since the start of MMS. We celebrated with sausages, sauerkraut and beer!  The Court was open to the public and all the proceedings and outcome will be published by the EPO.

Why have patents? There are people who say that all patents can be got around. Certainly I can see that in the approval stage, with bottomless pits of funding, big organisations can outspend smaller ones to deny patents, unless they truly are unique, inventive and novel, there is no prior art and you’ve done all the right legal things to get there. MMS started with patents initially to protect ourselves when we started up. It’s one of those quirks of German patent law that if the owning company decides not to maintain a patent, by law they have to offer it back to the inventor. This is what happened to us. A number of Dr Imhof’s previous patents were given up by the owning company and he took them over. This allowed us to enter the flotation market without fear of challenge of our technology. Since then MMS has come up with quite a range of new ideas and processes and where we have applied for patent protection it has always been granted.

The European Patent Office estimated that an average cost of obtaining a European patent and maintaining the patent for a 10 year term was around €32,000. So it is not a cheap route to go down simply for the kudos. In addition, the costs of International Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications and then validation in each and every country you require the patent, possibly including full translation, adds considerably to the initial and annual costs.

The idea of a patent is that it is a legal barrier to others to do the same for a set period of time. However, we can see that if some big company with the resources and deep pockets wanted to do the same or get around them they probably would. We see them more as a marketing tool to demonstrate our inventiveness and cleverness, and therefore by default, that our equipment or process is improving on existing technology in terms of performance, capital and operating cost.  Whilst corporately all companies will be wary of infringing patents it does not stop individuals in such companies giving it a go. We have come across quite a few instances with our and other technology where individuals in companies think they can do it better or cheaper than the patented technology. The desire to do this I think probably comes out of boredom in their job requirements and their need to utilise their abilities, or it may be just the belief that they can save their company money. These “reverse engineering” projects on our technology, which almost certainly are not know by corporate management, have come to our attention always because they have failed badly and then been attributed to us i.e. your process doesn’t work!  This is a situation that gives damage to reputations and is difficult to control.

One area where patents do help is that competitor companies become wary of infringement or the perception by customers of infringement which does help the original inventing company in getting the product into the market by differentiation of product.  A study in the USA showed that the average legal cost of a patent infringement case that comes to trial is over $1million. So if you are the patent owner you need to be really sure that you will win an accusation of infringement and get your costs awarded against the infringer, or the patents could become even more costly!

Inventions to Order?

Through MEI and Barry Wills’ blog the question has been asked by a supplier – is there need and/or desire for a new type of crusher?  This supplier is trying to evaluate if it’s worth spending the time, energy and more importantly, money to develop a new type of crusher. The lack of feedback on the so far from the MEI blog might indicate that this is a difficult area to develop something!  However it does beg the question – Can you invent to order?

Looking at the minerals industry and its structure, it’s very difficult. Having said that our company MMS was founded on exactly that; an inventor (Dr Rainer Imhof) who could invent equipment and develop processes to solve particular problems. Rainer wasn’t the original developer of pneumatic flotation (Bahr, Simonis) but to getting it working to a commercial level he has had to come up with a number of new inventions to solve particular problems. These are unique enough to allow MMS to patent. It doesn’t happen very often but on a few occasions Dr Imhof has (half jokingly) been asked to invent things and then come up with a solution. “Rainer could you find a solution to this xxxx problem!” He has gone away thought about it and then, a few times, come up with an elegant idea. A couple of these recent ideas MMS are in the process of trying to develop at the moment.

There are many people involved in “R&D” in our industry  but very little invention seems comes out of it. Most is focused research but rarely achieves any usable beneficial outcomes. The MEI blog has recently highlighted the amount of poor technical papers being submitted to MEI on Hydrometallurgy where the same old things have been regurgitated over and over. We as a company see it time and time again and wonder why the work was ever done. This is not just limited to academia, we also see it across the board in mining and processing government research organisations.

Money doesn’t seem to help (although we’re sure it would help us as a company). A major multinational corporation has recently tried to move into new business areas in fields not unrelated to our market so of course, we are interested in what they do. They seem to have a bottomless pit of money (many $m), resources and support to throw at trying to get their product introduced. They have even go so far as paying operations to have their equipment to be installed. This has happened in the past with limited success (think of mining companies with technology divisions). Without a workable product that people want, even money “can’t buy you love”.

There is the “light bulb” moment when someone sees the light, generally in an area unrelated to their field of expertise (ask Dr Imhof about his idea for keeping tennis balls fresh!). You just have to hope there is a market for your idea and that someone will try and commercialise it. Generally, this rarely happens. Again, as a company, we are often presented with such ideas by inventors. Almost invariably it is a great idea but with little commercial potential. Most process equipment ideas we see fall down on scalability – the requirement for high unit throughput in the minerals industry to make equipment economic. 

Back to the crushing problem. Yes, there have been no step change inventions in crushing over many decades, only incremental improvements in reducing costs by increasing unit throughputs and availability, reducing maintenance and increasing wear life. It is an extremely mature and tightly kept market. The potential savings on a new type of crusher appear limited. As crushing is relatively low energy (compared with say milling or ultra fine grinding) potential energy savings of a new type of conventional crusher will not make too much difference in the big picture. So we would see the only way for a new entrant to get into the market (obviously not this supplier who asked the question) is to copy the best bits of the current state of the art, try and improve on these incrementally and manufacture in a low cost country.

On the other hand it’s not actually “crushing” that the industry wants but “rock breakage”. Now there are any number of research projects out there (being done by the same researchers lambasted above!) trying to find the answer to more efficient and cost effective breakage – heating, cooling, microwaves, ultrasonic and other type of wave spectrums, electrical pulses, explosions etc. Now if any of these could be commercial at required unit throughputs then that would be a paradigm shift in the industry.

Dragon's Breath at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town

MMS attended the Mining Indaba in Cape Town this week (7 – 11 February). The Indaba is essentially a mining finance conference along the lines of PDAC, Mines & Money, Diggers & Dealers etc. in other countries, but focused on Africa.  Presentations are generally split between economic/finance and mining company presentations. The accompanying exhibition is again split between mining companies promoting their company and projects and service companies looking for business from mining companies. In amongst all these are the normal government agencies and NGO’s plying their trade.

Mineweb's Jan Chadwick & Lawrie Williams showing of their website on an iPad

MMS attendance is aimed at influencing senior executives with suitable projects in an early stage in directing their technical staff and consultants towards the commercial benefits of investigating state of the art technology.  We find this has to be relayed “top down” as well as from the “bottom up” to get any acknowledgement. In addition the consultants and engineers who generally undertake the scoping studies and prefeasibility studies where flowsheet decisions are already set need to be fully versed with the technology. We certainly don’t expect them to recommend new technology but we want them to know about it so they can at least not look surprised in front of the mining company!

The 2011 Indaba was one of the biggest with over 5000 registered delegates. As always with these things there was as much business done outside the conference in the many cocktail parties and events as there was in the Cape Town convention centre. As for outcomes; you couldn’t fail to notice the huge potential for new gold and iron ore operations in West Africa. From the economists what we could gather was that high metals prices were here for the foreseeable future. One Keynote Address we attended given by James Turk of GoldMoney claimed that gold was again going to be the standard that all currency was based on (without government’s ability to just print more) and that gold would be USD8000/oz in the near future. I had to check with others that I heard that number correctly!  He had all the historical charts and figures to back up his predictions. Now that would be an interesting price. I think we will be out mining for gold in Wales again.

Another area highlighted by the conference was the acknowledgement of responsibilities to the environment and sustainability by mining companies. Well, they doffed their hat to it anyway. There was a lot of interest in our low cost cyanide destruction process (soon to be commissioned at Randgold Resources new Tongon operation in the Ivory Coast). Also the legacy of Acid Mine Drainage from operations, which is highlighted by what is currently happening in the mined out Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Maelgwyn Mineral Services Africa Technical Director - Adrian Singh together with Ian Townsend of Outotec enjoying a glass of Cape wine after a long day at the conference.

We got to talk to a large number of mining executives who had potential sulphide gold projects or projects involving flotation. To be fair, they just about all listened to what we had to say and some even took notes when we outlined the cost benefits. We also had some really good discussions with the engineering and consulting companies present. So lots to follow up on in the coming weeks.

Up-take of New Technology in Mineral Processing (by Mike B)

As a company who has had the following statement on our website home page;

“The company is established as a world leader in the development and implementation of innovative cost effective technologies and processes in the field of mineral, chemical and waste processing. It has had many patents granted and has won a number of national innovation awards for its technology. The technology can achieve significant environmental benefits in terms of reduced energy and waste for operations.“

We are therefore very interested on how our industry reacts to new technology. And how our industry reacts I would say is very, very slowly. As a discussion example I’ve used technology that I currently don’t have any direct involvement with but at one time was one of the instigators in trying to get it introduced into mineral processing.

I first knowingly had exposure to high pressure grinding rolls (HPGR’s) as a metallurgist with Billiton when I was investigating their possible use for Boddington and Mt Todd gold mines in Australia. That was already in 1990. Only 20 years later, now in 2010, Boddington has installed Polysius HPGR’s and I read that the new owners of Mt Todd (after a few prior owners failed to make a profitable operation) are now finally planning to use HPGR’s in the proposed new flowsheet.  Prof Klaus Schonert’s original German patent No 2 708 053 was granted in 1979. The Boddington installations are deemed now by many as the start of the acceptance of HPGR’s into main stream mineral processing flowsheets. That is 31 years after the granting of the first patent. Most international patents only last somewhere between 17 and 22 years.

So why has it taken almost a working life time before HPGR’s have even started to be accepted in the minerals industry?  The technology surely must be the most important “new invention” patent in our industry for the last 100 years. A Supreme Court judge in the USA said as much in upholding Schonert’s patent in an infringement case in the 1980’s. It perhaps matches the inventions of the Polaroid camera or Xerox photocopier in other industries.  Any serious research into the technology by a competent metallurgist or engineer over the last 30 years should have convinced most of the operating and cost benefits of including HPGR’s in a circuit. So why aren’t they everywhere?

In their plenary paper at the 1992 Extractive Metallurgy of Gold and Base Metals conference in Kalgoorlie Norm Seaton and Robin Batterham essentially précised general marketing theory that represents the forces that inhibit the implementation of new mineral processing equipment, technology and processes into the form of a probability equation.

P          =          R  x  N  x  (CC)/(CP)

Where,

P is the likelihood that a new process will be installed

R is the size of the reward if the new process is successful

N is the number of similar applications of the process in this industry

CC is the size of the company doing the purchasing

CP is the capital cost of the new process

This equation indicates, amongst other things, that if N is a very small number (or zero) then success in our industry requires exceptional circumstances.

So what were the real barriers to HPGR’s in the minerals industry?  Those who know a bit about them will know that they were immediately and rapidly accepted in the cement industry with the first units installed in 1985 and then with over 300th machines already installed by 1992s. This tells you that the nature of the industry and criteria for their use in cement manufacture is very different to their use liberating minerals. One point that is interesting to note is that the first two installations were paid for by German and EU government grants to help with the development of new technology. This took care of N = 0 in the above equation in that industry. Cement is a commodity of generally local supply in a competitive market place with relatively small margins. The vast majority of the production costs relate to energy. So when these first plants had success in dramatically reducing their grinding costs by the introduction of the HPGR’s it gave them a competitive advantage. The competitors simply had to follow suit and install HPGR’s or be forced out of the market. The cement industry is characterised by having a small number of large international corporations having equity and controlling operations world-wide. Also, in building cement manufacturing plants, three major engineering companies at that time had probably 95% of the market for supplying turn-key plants. All this led to a remarkable diffusion of knowledge, take-up and acceptance of HPGR’s world-wide.

Contrast this to the nature of the mineral processing industry where any number of engineering, consultancy or equipment supply companies compete for the right to design or engineer or even build the process plant. No diffusion of knowledge or interest to take the lead here.

There are many macro and micro issues as to why take up was quick in cement and slow in mineral processing - too many to go into detail here. One of the major reasons put forward for the very slow adoption of HPGR’s in the minerals industry has been the more abrasive nature of minerals. This consequently let to the much higher wear rates on the early type of hard facing used as a wear protection and therefore low machine availabilities. This was the case in the early years but in reality, even with these issues, the economic benefit and technical advantages of HPGR’s would still easily have made it worthwhile to install instead of the norm equipment. The development of the stud lining (and then other similar wear surfaces) in 1993 negated this issue, but again, that was 17 years ago.

There was in fact some limited use of HPGR’s in mineral applications in the early days. Two examples are the liberation of diamonds from kimberlite (without breaking diamonds) and iron ore pellet production where the ability to reduce blaine values, increase green pellet strength and decrease porosity of the pellet offered a huge advantage to producers, pushing them over the tipping point where the risks of the unknown were outweighed by the advantages (big R in the above equation).

The biggest inhibitor in embracing and benefiting from the development of technology like the HPGR’s is the structure of our industry itself. The builders of mineral processing plants are firmly divided into two camps. One is the group of large multi-national mining companies that makes profits from the sale of its products based on the efficiency in which it mines and processes these products. This should be the group embracing the use of cost effective improvement in technology and processes. However, despite top down mission statements and visions for efficiency and cost improvements in these companies and large funds dedicated to R&D, focused research and process improvements etc. it is very difficult to get new technology approved. These companies can have a multi layer of stakeholders protecting their personal vested interests in their area of domain. With this they can highlight all the potential risks and fatal flaws whether real or imaginary. For all the positive people, it only takes one dissenting voice to obtain a negative decision. The second group is the small and medium size cap companies on the various stock markets around the world. I would suggest that when ever they get in the position of having to develop a mine and build a process facility the focus of the controllers of these companies is more about maximising the current share price (and getting out?) than building the most cost efficient plant for the future. They mostly could not care less about the possible benefits of any new technology.

Having said the above about these two groups I must say that you have to accept both positions as the nature of the business. This makes it hard for new technology. There is hope in a small number of companies that have managed to grow to a sustainable size but have not yet lost the capability to implement new ideas. This really is the very small target market for new technology developers.

In 1994 I wrote a business plan for the introduction of the HPGR into the minerals industry “A Strategy for the Future”. Despite at the time having all my new found knowledge on the theory of innovation and new technology it is slightly embarrassing now to see that I had extrapolated that there would be 99 sales of HPGR’s in the minerals industry in 2010! In my defence it was based on the assumption that the company for who it was written would instigate recommendations to accelerate the up-take, such as assisting with demonstration installations on operating mines and other measures which were not acted on.

It is interesting to note that the current workhorse of our industry – the ball mill – also initially struggled. After the first one was installed in Germany in 1876 it took about 15 years for anyone to see the real benefits and before the second mill was installed in the industry.

The Dragons Breath Blog will be breathing fire!

The Dragons Breath Blogs will be the thoughts and ramblings of some of the characters involved in Maelgwyn Mineral Services (MMS). The blog is not intended to be filled with company news items as that is why we have the “News” section of the company website (www.maelgwyn.com). Rather, we want to share our opinions of topics related to mining, mineral processing and the environment. It obviously will be influenced by the products and processes that MMS are working on because that’s what we do. And we’ve been doing MMS stuff for nearly 14 years and industry stuff for over 30 years (some of us) so we are quite passionate about it.

We want to make things interesting, almost certainly challenging, maybe worth discussion and hopefully entertaining, because after all, we are fairly keen to have “followers” following us and keep following us. Otherwise there is not much point if we just keep things to ourselves. We have management meetings (and the pub) for that.

So, what are we going to blog about? Well, for sure innovation (or lack of it) and up take of new technology in the minerals industry. That’s something we’re keen on but get very frustrated by. We’re also going to blog on pertinent current topics such as the use of cyanide for gold recovery and the relevance of the Cyanide Code; the importance of improving energy efficiencies in our processes, especially in liberation; and why, after 113 years we are mostly still using big, inefficient tanks with massive energy inefficient stirrers to contact liberated minerals with air bubbles (innovation, what innovation?). OK, that last one we do have strong opinions about. With a bit of luck there will be many more thought provoking topics.

We’re going to try and keep the blog coming at regular intervals so keep following.