PRESENTATION
2017 - Users Conference - San Francisco - Mining, Metals & Materials
24K Magic - How Data Was Used to Improve Gold Recovery
Aurelia Metals Limited (AMI) is Gold and Base Metals mining company located in Orange NSW, Australia.
At the end of 2015, Aurelia Metals were grappling with a new plant that was not performing at nameplate capacity, and had a significant debt burden. To address this, the company embarked upon a process optimisation campaign to improve productivity and reduce costs. With the assistance of Convergio, a new PI System was installed and used as the primary tool to identify improvement opportunities and implement electronic reporting solutions.
This presentation describes the various activities completed through 2016, and correlates these activities with the company's official financial and production reports released to the Australian Stock Exchange. Particular attention is given to the key metrics of metal recovery, throughput and operating costs, and how the PI System was used as the primary analytics and reporting tool. The result of this campaign has resulted in the company significantly improving it's balance sheet.
Industry
- Metals Mining & Materials
Company
Convergio
Speaker
Gavin Strack
Gavin has been working in the control, instrumentation and communications fields for almost 20 years in the defence, telecommunications, and mineral processing industries, and has held various positions in operations & maintenance, process control engineering, consulting and EPCM fields. He co-Founded an Automation & Software Consultancy in 2015, which services the mineral processing industry across Australia.
Prior to starting Convergio, Gavin spent 5 years as the Manager – Process Control for Barrick Australia Pacific and Gold Fields Australia. During this time Gavin has led numerous process improvement campaigns across Barrick’s and Gold Fields operations, which include sites in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Zambia and Saudi Arabia. This included being the champion to install PI Systems across all of Barrick’s regional operations and integrating them into an Enterprise PI System.
Gavin holds a Bachelor of Engineering, an MBA and is a Chartered Professional Engineer.
Company
Aurelia Metals
Speaker
Peter Smith
Peter has been working in the mineral processing industry as a metallurgist since graduating from Murdoch in 1992. His experience includes 15 years in gold processing by CIP and 5 years producing manganese sulphate monohydrate by sulphur dioxide leaching of manganese dioxide
His current role at Aurelia involves process optimisation of a polymetallic gold silver lead zinc operation including gravity recovery, intensive cyanidation, flotation, high intensity cyanide leaching of concentrate (~3500ppm CN) and Merrill Crowe
Prior to joining Aurelia Metals as the Senior Metallurgist, he was Processing Manager for Barrick at the Plutonic Gold Mine in Western Australia.
Peter holds a Bachelor of Science (Extractive Metallurgy) from Murdoch University and a Graduate Diploma in Education from the University of Western Australia. Peter is a Chartered Professional Metallurgist with the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (CP Met AusIMM).