JOHANNESBURG (miningweeky.com) – A new mining method, which avoids the wasteful shattering of precious metal during blasting, has the potential to boost gold and platinum mining significantly, says highly experienced research coordinator Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson.

Selected blast mining (SBM), assisted by modern computer programming, could be re-piloted in a matter of months to become standard practice across South Africa’s narrow-reef precious metals mines within a year, the former director of the National Institute for Metallurgy, now Mintek, says in a Mining Weekly Online video interview. (To watch this video interview, click on the icon on the picture accompanying this article).

Currently, a high percentage of precious metal fails 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.

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, says Robinson.

“The critical part of this is that if you use SBM, you avoid this loss of gold and/or platinum,” says Robinson, who has been associated with the South African mining industry since 1949.

After retiring in 1990, he formed AC Mining Consulting Services and worked intensively on SBM, which involves fracturing rock in such a way that the reef remains intact.

The former Sentrachem director of mining chemicals and explosives would like to see SBM set in motion immediately, ahead of AngloGold Ashanti’s promising automated raise-boring technology, which he expects also to come into its own over time as a fully automated mechanical cutting method.

Equipment for AngloGold Ashanti’s “game-changing” technology, which mines “all of the gold, only the gold, all the time, safely”, is under construction, with the first machines scheduled to become available in the first quarter of 2014.

Figuratively speaking, Robinson is “pretty sure” that SBM can be introduced “tomorrow”.

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 acid-mine drainage 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 advocates crops being grown within mine precincts for the production of biofuels 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 to Mining Weekly Online.

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.