Canadian Mineral Processors’ Annual Conference: The must-attend event for the Canadian mining industry
For a number of years, Multotec Canada’s team has participated in the annual conference of the Canadian Mineral Processors, a technical society of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. This year, Canadian industry professionals gathered from January 20 to 24 at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa to discuss subjects like gold and iron processing, as well as industry innovations to optimize processing plants and processes.
Essential for keeping up to date
As a leader in ore processing, Multotec Canada is committed to keeping up with innovations and everything new in the field. By sending its employees to three days of presentations and a day of workshops, Multotec Canada fulfills its objective of ensuring continuous improvement.
Essential for bringing the team together
Multotec Canada has two offices in Canada, one covering eastern North America (Montréal) and the other western North America (Vancouver). At this event, not only the industry but also Multotec Canada’s employees from across Canada came together to share their knowledge.
They also were able to participate in the yearly Ray MacDonald Memorial Hockey Challenge pitting participants from eastern and western Canada against each other in an intense hockey match. Marc-Olivier Gagnon from the Montréal office is our expert on samplers and on local fabrication of our equipment. Besides being a very skilled and multi-faceted engineer, Marc-Olivier is also an excellent goalie. The photos tell the story!
Issues in the mining industry in 2019
As in any other industry, issues change and evolve over time. In 2019, innovation, labour shortages and sustainable development were at the heart of discussions.
Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and workforce
Obviously, the use of artificial intelligence to improve processes and optimize plants was one important subject. The mining industry is not the most evolved technologically, but it has plans to remedy the situation in the coming year by upgrading to new, avant-garde technologies.
With 3.3% of positions vacant in the third quarter of 2018 in Canada and 4.1% in the province of Québec, the labour shortage is become a more and more important issue. How does the mining industry intend to deal with it? Attracting young talents is a possible solution that will need to emphasize the role of technology in the trades. Thus efforts to emphasize the value of the industry and the jobs it offers should be starting in the coming months.
Sustainable development
Sustainable development is a concept in long-term economic growth that considers the environment, society and the economy. It was at the heart of a number of discussions, especially those on the basic equipment used in ore processing and the preconcentration phase. Ore preconcentration, meaning separating out non-ore-bearing rock before the first stage of in-plant processing, can be carried out in a way that fosters sustainable development.
For example, you can reduce the number of loads of ore transported from the extraction site to the processing plant. This improves transportation time, reduces travel costs, consumes less energy and has other substantial benefits.
Multotec Canada can recommend, at this stage, the use of x-ray ore sorters from Bourevestnik and of products like dense media separation cyclones (DMS or DMC cyclones) that sort ore by its optical/atomic or densimetric properties.
An eagerly-awaited 52nd Conference
Finally, the event was a great success for skill development, creation of new business opportunities and continuous improvement. The Multotec Canada team is already anxious to participate in the Canadian Mineral Processors 52nd Annual Conference in 2020.