Faced with cost pressures and declining ore grades, mineral producers need to squeeze every ton, ounce and gram of value from their resources
Yesterday’s discards form tomorrow’s resource — at least that was the way it used to be. Not anymore, though, as concentrator operators work continuously to optimize their circuits and improve their product recovery as a way of combatting the scourge of rising operating costs. Sometimes installing completely new technology provides an answer. More often, however, plant audits and modeling can show where existing equipment can be tuned to become more efficient at doing what it is intended to do, and at a lower cost. And once in a while, some blue-sky thinking can result in recovery improvements that had previously been thought of as unattainable.
