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Call for jobless mining engineer graduates to spearhead research revolution

Research commentator Dr Robbie Robinson outlines to Mining Weekly Online’s Martin Creamer his vision for making best use of the surfeit of mining engineers graduating from South African universities. Photographs: Duane Daws. Video and Video Editing: Nicholas Boyd.

2nd June 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A call was made on Tuesday for the current surfeit of highly trained but jobless South African mining engineering university graduates to be directed towards spearheading a research revolution involving the creation of mining clusters that have agriculture on waste mine land and mineral recovery from slimes dams as their economic underpin.

Veteran mining research commentator Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson, the one-time National Institute for Metallurgy, now Mintek, director and regular commentator in the Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM), makes the call in the attached Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online video interview.

Robinson’s comments follow those of University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Professor Emeritus Huw Phillips, who writes in the latest edition of the SAIMM publication that mining engineering graduates are now struggling to find employment and that some of the best graduates are being cut loose on graduation, despite having received mining industry bursaries throughout their undergraduate studies.

After decades of undersupply, Phillips reports that many mining engineering graduates are now resorting to finding jobs anywhere, with their likelihood of ever returning to mining remote.

“We all know that mining is a cyclic business and also that 'the darkest hour is just before dawn'.

“The industry must now have the foresight to develop this raw talent to ensure we’re well positioned to take advantage of the next upturn,” writes Phillips, who adds that the broadness of the education and the skills that the graduates have received equips them for a place in the general workforce, far from the mining industry itself.

Robinson points out that the raw talent to which Professor Phillips refers has received some of the best training in the world, up-to-date visual training in three dimensions, using computer techniques and extending beyond mining into extraction metallurgy, civil, geological and also agricultural engineering.

Robinson advocates that these graduates be directed to spearhead a revolution in teaching, training and, more than anything else, in research “because there is so much wonderful research to be done to restore the whole mining industry”.

Robinson’s vision, which he has detailed in innumerable SAIMM articles, involves turning inert slimes dames to profitable and job-creating account.

He cites the concrete examples of how the now defunct Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (JCI) ran a highly profitable fruit growing, packaging and exporting business on waste mine land at its Western Areas mine and how JCI also had a chemicals company that used ion-exchange technology to neutralise acid mine drainage (AMD) and recover minerals for sale, including gypsum.

All this can be done, he says, through the establishment of mining clusters that will not only keep the jobless graduates active through normal mining activities, but also embrace schools and training centres, patronised by the people on the mines and perhaps visitors from overseas and many others.

His plan is for these centres to be subjected to the same sort of training that the hundreds of jobless mining engineering graduates were subjected to at Wits, Pretoria, Johannesburg and the other universities involved.

His role for the surfeit of graduates is one of interaction with the cluster students as part-time career advisers and leading these students into a research and innovation philosophy while also doing mining work.

He envisages all those involved participating in research work that can be done in these mining clusters, which he sees as potentially getting the best out of the mining industry and also facilitating the social coherence and common loyalties the sector so desperately needs.

He reports that the Tavland fruit-orchard scheme JCI established at its Western Areas mine, near Carletonville, employed 10 000 people from the surrounding areas.

“They made a fortune,” Robinson recalls in the video interview with Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online (see attached).

Also, the AMD-beating ion-exchange technology that JCI’s chemicals business used continues to exist in research form, awaiting potential commercial exploitation.

He envisages farmer families running small-lot agriculture on waste mine land, using drip irrigation and producing, besides fruit, a variety of crops, including maize and even tobacco, into which airlines, including South African Airways, and aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing are investing R70-billion, with the aim of producing aviation fuel from the fatty oils of tobacco plants.

He envisages cultivation taking place on slimes dams that have been stripped of their toxic metals and minerals through the use of the ion-exchange technology JCI used to create gypsum.

These can be recovered for commercial value, leaving behind inert slimes dams that are ideal for drip irrigation.

“These are flat lands and you can do beautiful small-lot farming on them,” says Robinson, who has outlined in detail in his innumerable SAIMM editorials exactly how this can be done and the amount of money that can be made from doing so.

Phillips, who was honoured with professor emeritus status last year after serving 27 years as a full professor at the Wit’s School of Mining Engineering, speaks in his article about the “high quality” of ten student papers published as part of this year’s SAIMM student colloquium.

“It’s all too easy to regard young graduates, at the start of their working lives, as a cost rather than an asset,” he chides.

While conceding that many of the graduates may at this stage be unsuitable for a career within the narrow confines of 'production', he pleads the case for them to be considered for employment in the increasingly important 'service departments' of minerals industry companies, where technical skills are in short supply.

“This once great industry is at a low ebb as it struggles to come to terms with the forces imposed on it by the past decade,” he adds, pointing out that particularly the gold sector has relied on brawn with physical effort delivering the product. However, to remain competitive in the twenty-first century it will be brains rather than brawn that will make the difference.

Robinson sees the added-value components of his vision as being capable of paying decent salaries, with most of the opportunities emanating from agricultural clusters on mines but the same model also being migrated to industry.

“The steps to put this all together have already been taken,” he claims.

SELECTED MINE BLASTING

Robinson is also a staunch advocate of a new mining method that prevents the wasteful shattering of precious metal like gold and platinum, during blasting.

He sees selected blast mining (SBM), assisted by modern computer programming, as having the potential to boost gold and platinum mining significantly.

He is against the high percentage of precious metal – a national patrimony – failing to find its way into refined bar because of reef being widely scattered during blasting.

This relates to what miners refer to as the mine call factor, which is the difference between the quantity of precious metal in the ground and the actual quantity of precious metal that ends up in refined form.

Mechanical engineer Rod Pickering, who spent 20 years at the Chamber of Mines Research Organisation running the stoping technology laboratory before leading Wits’ Centre for Mechanised Mining Systems, has seen merit in combining SMB with mechanised mining, which he finds provides the best of two worlds.

Robinson believes that SBM has the potential to increase the mine call factor dramatically, from its current parlous 70% for gold and 65% for platinum to a nigh 100% for both.

With SBM, shock waves transmitted into the reef layer throw the waste material away from the stope face, leaving space for the reef material to drop to the floor without the losses of the fine precious metal that occur when the high velocity explosion gases generated in current blasting methods disperse ultra fine particles.

Robinson further advocates the use of hydrometallurgical platinum processing to avoid the high cost of smelting.

His addendums to SBM in gold mining include underground crushing, underground pressure leaching and solving the AMD problems at the same time.

All these augment his mine community cluster concept and concomitant mine-agriculture interface to solve South Africa’s worrying migrant labour problems.

He also advocates the use of biofuels from crops grown on waste mine land to power mining equipment.

From maize, ethanol could be produced, which he describes as the “only suitable fuel in mine automation”.

“Research is a spider’s web of possibilities and I am trying to convince the mining industry to have a portfolio of research and to get away from the careful selection of one favourite project,” he comments.

His philosophy is to have a portfolio of research projects where there are several alternatives to solving a problem.

“If you’ve got three alternatives, your chances of finding the final answer is much better than if you just select one,” he adds.

Robinson has also been vocal on the potential for South African mines to recover more cobalt using SBM.

“If you can selectively separate the reef part of the underground ore reserve and throw the waste rock aside, the cobalt concentration once that ore reaches the surface is very much higher and becomes easier to recover,” says Robinson.

“If you adopt a zero waste, non-toxic philosophy on waste residues, it’s easy enough to recover all that cobalt, while also recovering uranium and quite a number of other elements that have potential value.

“We should be doing this, and it should be started just as soon as we possibly can,” he says, against the background of the current buzz in the cobalt world following the announcement of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors’ $5-billion lithium-ion battery ‘gigafactory’ plan for the US.

Tesla Motors CEO is Elon Musk, the South African-born Canadian-American entrepreneur, inventor and investor, who was schooled in South Africa at Pretoria Boys High.

Robinson says that by adopting the hydrometallurgical approach to platinum processing, cobalt can be recovered as a high-purity cobalt metal.

Every narrow-reef gold mine has some cobalt in it, but it ends up as one of the toxic elements in AMD.

All this research and development potential could be grist to the mill of jobless mining engineering graduates of both genders, who were encouraged to study mining engineering during the boom years and who are now facing bust.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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