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.