Mining and Exploration

How can it be that a significant copper deposit, known for over 100 years, owned and operated by a progression of operators – including two leading international names – can struggle along for 93 years and then become an overnight success in 2005?

Ghana holds a particularly special place in recent African history, being as it was the first sub-Saharan Africa nation to gain independence from European colonialism in 1957. In the near five decades since the country has gone on to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world with one of the highest GDP per capita in all of Africa.

As a result of the boom in mining, the South American nation of Chile today holds a number of important titles. These include being the world’s largest producer of copper, 32 percent of the world’s production to be exact, its only, and therefore leading, producer of natural nitrates and its leading producer of iodine, rhenium and lithium.

They say that in order to get a job done well you have to get your hands dirty from time to time, and a truer statement was perhaps never spoken than when it comes to the mining industry. The sheer scale of the equipment used and the nature of the environments that are being operated in make mining a highly maintenance intensive undertaking. This inevitably results in a large concentration of dirt being produced.

When we last spoke to Roger Amelunxen, owner of Canadian-based Amelunxen Mineral Processing (Aminpro), in March 2012, he spoke about the raft of changes that has occurred in his field of expertise over the previous 15 years. Now, as we enter 2013, he is just as keen to discuss how the business has evolved in little more than 10 months since.

The most widely used of all minerals, iron accounts for approximately 95 percent of the world’s metal production in terms of weight. As the world’s third largest iron ore producer and exporter, Brazil has long reaped the financial benefits provided by one of its largest export products.

Mining has been a part of life in the Norilsk area since the 1920s, during which time the seeds were sown for what would become a lucrative industry for the region and Russia as a whole over the course of the subsequent century. It was in 1935 that the government of the USSR created the Norilsk Combine and 1943 that Norilsk managed to produce an annual total of 4000 tonnes of refined nickel, before hitting its target figure of 10,000 tonnes just two years later in 1945.

While for much of its 161 year history Liberia has been a stable and productive democracy, recent decades have seen the country plagued by civil war and adversely affected by the drying up of foreign investment. Nevertheless, the current government of Liberia, led by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is determined to lead the country into a new age of economic growth.

Founded in 1987, the Time Mining Group employs almost 400 staff and operates principally under the names of Time Mining and Processing Pty Ltd., Performance Laboratories Pty Ltd., Time Mining (Ghana) Limited and Dump and Dune Drillers Pty Ltd.

In addition to providing process plant design, project management and commissioning and optimisation services for minerals processing plants, the group also delivers analytical services, and commercial and on-site laboratories, through their Performance Laboratories entity.