Recently, I have written several articles around the 25 years of democracy that we have experienced, and the 125 years of the SAIMM’s history. These articles acknowledged the challenges we have experienced as an industry, but focused on the feeling of a ‘new dawn’ for a ‘sunrise industry’. As I write this, we are into election week, and so our…

The papers in this edition of the Journal have been written on excellent research work carried out in the field of geometallurgy, presented at the SAIMM’s Geometallurgy Conference, held in Cape Town in August 2018. This conference followed a similar conference held some years earlier, in Johannesburg, and the difference in the quality and content of the papers clearly illustrates…

The papers in this edition are all related to Mineral Resource Management, the field in which Professor Richard Minnitt practised for many years in the Chair in Mineral Resources at the University of the Witwatersrand. Professor Minnitt has followed the great luminary, the late Danie Krige, in pioneering many aspects of this field, especially in the areas of geostatistics and…

The 2nd Furnace Tapping Conference (Furnace Tapping 2018) was held in Skukuza, the main camp of the world-renowned Kruger National Park, from 14 to 17 October 2018. As with the 1st Furnace Tapping Conference (Furnace Tapping 2014), Furnace Tapping 2018 was well supported and attended by 144 delegates from 17 different countries spanning five continents. A problem-based event, the Furnace…

With the increasingly challenging techno-economic climate we now operate in, coupled with the rise in the need to mine more heterogeneous and complex orebodies, geome tallurgy represents a collective, multidisciplinary mine-planning approach to both maximizing value and managing the risk emanating from ore variability. The first SAIMM Geometallurgy Conference, held from 7 to 8 August 2018 at the Lagoon Beach…

For the first time in history, a pathway for ALD-enhanced materials to be rapidly developed and transitioned in a UJ laboratory will be available for nearly any application. The laboratory construction is a natural next step in implementing the strategy to establish national nanotechnology in South Africa.

Following the announcement in October 2018 of WorleyParsons’ binding offer for Jacobs’ Energy, Chemicals and Resources (ECR) line of business, the combined new entity has come together under a new brand – Worley – as of 29 April 2019. While financially an acquisition, operationally the transaction is a combination of two highly complementary organisations that creates a pre-eminent global provider of professional…