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Gold/Mining/Energy : Bema(Bgo) and Arizona Star
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To: AugustWest who wrote (10382)5/17/2002 9:55:59 PM
From: E. Charters   of 10482
 
It wouldn't surprise me that Fluor is being blamed for Refuse-to-Go's shortcomings. Companies have repeatedly attacked more and more refractory ores with more and more wingy methods. They think they can buy a solution out of the box. If miners in times gone by had taken that attitude there would have been no Canadian mining industry.

The true story of mine development is constant engineering development and research in order to "tune" or optimize/change processes. All Canadian gold mining successes stem from the ingenuity of the recovery process development. Without froth flotation and advanced techniques in recovery developed in this age, many orebodies would not be ore.

We have seen near a generation of Carbon-in-Pulp type milling "solutions" tried in Gold mining recommended by such stalwart political entities are SNC Lavalin. No Mills-Crow they. Ever since Carbon-in-Pulp was first tried unsuccessfully in the Phillipines it has plagued many a miner who would recover gold, until a string of bankruptcies had littered the trail of mine development in the past 30 years. Nobody saw the smoking carbon gun.

If you want to mine and mill, you have to engineer the recovery process. Dummies don't do this. It costs more than a dollar. It must be an ongoing research project dedicated to the solution of winning a metal from a particular and often unique ore. In reality there are no off the shelf economic solutions, as mature an industry as this is. No built mill can be expected to be turnkey with regard to the recovery problem. No staff can be expected to be mill chimps and process ore with optimal recoveries day in day out. No milling process should be regarded as static. If the mill and mine are static, so shall the company's balance sheet eventually be.

Having said this, I am afraid that who to ask to provide solutions is a thorny problem. PhD's have led us to ever more dicey situations economically. We have been blinded by science. Huge names in consultation build lousy mills. But little St. Andrews with so called amateurs in Timmins actually did not a bad job on their mill, and cheaply too. I worked. It's too bad they got caught in the downdraft in exploration and ran out of mine development money.

EC<:-}
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