As an industry, we are obliged to ensure our plant feed requires the lowest power and water consumption and the smallest footprint tailing-management facility. Every opportunity to reject waste when it’s still coarse, dry and conveyable should be assessed.
So here’s the dilemma: we cannot include pre-concentration stages in flowsheet design without some level of demonstration and yet, we never get the opportunity. For a greenfield project, we cannot evaluate pre-concentration due to a lack of standardised testing methods and sample topsize constraints. It’s exacerbated by our current testing practices where sample preparation involves stage-crushing down to a manageable size – destroying the opportunity to evaluate coarse beneficiation methods. This webinar covers recent progress by the author to develop a standardised ranking test using ½ drill core samples. The objective is to consider pre-concentration at an early study stage and quantify the impact on project economics.
