May 2013 - Annual Banquet
Len Buchanan
This year we hosted Norm Lotter from Xstrata in Sudbury, ON as our banquet speaker. Norm is an expert in Modern Process Mineralogy, which has been under development as an integrated hybrid discipline for the last 25 years. Norm works with a team in the fields of sampling, geology, mineral science and mineral processing to speed sampling and mineral characterization to bring projects to market more quickly than in the past. There are only about six integrated teams such as Xstrata's around the world, and they are busy all the time.
Norm's department was asked to look at opportunities to become at least partially self-financing and within the first year he and his team generated revenues from other mining companies that ...
Norm described how the industrial process changes identified and implemented at Xstrata Nickel’s Nickel Rim South Project enabled the mill to treat this new and different ore body.
He also discussed the Sudbury basin and how the Nickel Rim resource has very different mineralogy than the conventional Sudbury ore, which has been mined and treated at Strathcona for decades.