Tag Archives: Consulting

BBA expands in North America with new Salt Lake City office

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As part of its international growth strategy, BBA has opened an office in Salt Lake City, USA, bringing the consulting engineering services company closer to its clients in a region that, it says, offers attractive business opportunities, particularly in the mining and metals sector.

Hassiba Lkoun, Director of Engineering, and Marc Tardif (pictured on the left with Jérôme Pelletier, President and CEO of BBA), an expert in process control and operational technology, have been on site for several weeks now preparing to open this new branch in the United States.

“We’re already busy building strong relationships with local partners and stakeholders, as well as carrying out automation and electrical engineering mandates at Rio Tinto’s Kennecott mine, located some 30 minutes from Salt Lake City,” LKoun said.

BBA has been providing a wide range of consulting engineering services for over 40 years. Today, its engineering, environmental and commissioning experts team up to, the company says, quickly and accurately pinpoint the needs of industrial and institutional clients, including those in the energy and natural resources industry.

Nordgold and DuPont Sustainable Solutions to develop safety improvement roadmap

Communications in mining, Mining safety, Mining services, Sustainable mining, , , , , , ,

Nordgold says it will develop a safety improvement roadmap for its mining operations with DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS).

The gold miner has invited DSS, an operations management consulting firm, to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the safety culture of the company’s operations, it said.

The project is a part of Nordgold’s global Technical Excellence program, aimed at improving processes, systems and employee skills to successfully align them with the industry best practices throughout the entire value chain, including ESG processes.

The assessment will cover all mines and include documentation reviews, interviews, field visits and focus groups.

DSS is to support Nordgold’s leadership in developing a three-year safety improvement roadmap and health, safety and environmental competency model, to deliver a sustained risk reduction and improved safety performance of more than 8,000 Nordgold employees and contractors.

In 2020, Nordgold says it achieved zero employee fatalities and decreased its LTIFR to 0.14.

Nikolai Zelenski, Nordgold CEO, said: “Safety remains at the core of everything we do and this partnership is a pragmatic example of our commitment towards achieving zero harm for our people.”

Knight Piésold and JDS Energy & Mining to work on NRG’s HMN lithium PEA

Energy minerals, Mineral exploration, Mineral project development, Mining services, , , , , , , , ,

NRG Metals has selected global consulting firm Knight Piésold Consulting and engineering, project, and construction management company JDS Energy & Mining to prepare a NI 43-101-compliant preliminary economic assessment (PEA) on its flagship Hombre Muerto Norte (HMN) lithium project, in Salta Province, Argentina.

The HMN project is in the Hombre Muerto Salar, an area of active lithium production. The development strategy for HMN focuses on production of 5,000 t/y of lithium carbonate, with the potential for expansion.

A site visit was completed in December 2018 and the project evaluation and report are progressing in a timely manner, according to NRG. The report is expected to be completed during the March quarter.

NRG recently filed an updated resource estimate for HMN, which identified 571,000 t of lithium carbonate-equivalent at a grade of 0.0756% Li in the combined measured and indicated categories, with a low magnesium to lithium ratio of 2.6:1. This calculation will be used in the PEA.

Orelogy to run the numbers for FYI at Cadoux high purity alumina project

Base metals, Energy minerals, Mineral commodities, Mineral exploration, Mineral processing, Mineral project development, Mining project news, Mining services, Steel and iron ore

FYI Resources has appointed Orelogy Consulting as mining study manager for the Cadoux project, responsible for site operations design and scheduling of the high purity alumina (HPA) economic studies.

The consultant will take on early-stage analysis of mining at Cadoux, in Western Australia, while providing an overview of “mining requirements, scheduling, stockpiles, waste dumps, tailings storage facilities, and the associated logistics, capital requirements, key challenges and risks”, FYI said.

FYI’s Cadoux project has a total indicated and inferred resource base of 16.1 million tonnes at 11.76% Al, 0.51% Fe and 0.37% Ti. The geology of the kaolin deposit – shallow and flat lying – means it should be amenable to a low-cost, free digging mining operation, while the company’s kaolin to HPA process flowsheet has been successfully demonstrated with an HPA grade of 99.99% achieved, plus a mass HPA recovery of 97.2% attained.

Back in January, FYI employed GR Engineering Services to carry out a prefeasibility study on a processing facility able to treat 120,000 tonnes per year of kaolin ore for feed to a specially designed beneficiation and refining plant producing up to 10,000 t/y of HPA.

The deliverables for Orelogy’s mining study include:

  • Electronic data package of the block model, topography, pit design(s)
  • Cutoff grade determination, stockpile binning methodology
  • ROM/stockpile layout
  • Waste dumping strategy
  • Rehandle strategy
  • Rehabilitation strategy and closure plans
  • Dewatering plans/issues
  • Grade control plans
  • Managing trafficability
  • Cost estimates.

Orelogy has also been engaged to undertake tradeoff studies to determine the most appropriate fleet size for campaign mining, continuous mining and single versus double shift.

FYI’s managing direct Roland Hill said: “Orelogy have a good reputation in the industry for the mining phase of the study and we are delighted to have them on board and take responsibility for this aspect of the HPA strategy.”