Search Documents

This paper provides a financial perspective to the valuation of Australian resource companies and projects. Valuation exercises need, however, to be seen in the broader context of a thorough business appraisal, one that incorporates all disciplines employed in the resources industry. Fine tuning a discount rate or determining a particular capital structure is likely to be less important to valuation than an adequate understanding of industry dynamics and a company's likely performance in future years.

Jan 1, 1989

By Ronald Klepper

In hydrometallurgy, pure gases like oxygen and hydrogen are used for oxidation and reduction. The gases are expensive and therefore should be used efficiently. Non reacted gas can be recycled into the liquid. Historically vortex gassing has been used; Le. a mixing impeller close to the liquid surface entrains gas from the headspace into the liquid through a gas vortex. Novel and more efficient methods are surface gassing with up pumping impellers and self- inducing gassing impellers. These alternative impeller systems are well established and common in the chemical industry, but have not been used until recently in hydrometallurgy. Gassing impellers act as internal compressors and increase the interfacial surface for a much higher mass transfer compared to alternate methods mentioned. In the paper results from lab and pilot tests and data from operated plants will be presented. The reactions with gases normally take place under moderate to high pressure, therefore a safe enclosure with mechanical seals and the safety "philosophy" is important. Experienced life and replacement cycles will be reported.

Jan 1, 2000

By Christopher Haycocks

Subsidence induced innerburden shearing and stress fields, whether active or passive, frequently contribute to significant ground control failures in overlying seams. In this paper proven multi-seam technology is used on upper seams to forecast and quantify the magnitude and severity of damage and the increased mining risk due to interaction. Increased upper seam ground control problems are demonstrated using hazard mapping which provides a viable technique for utilizing damage predictions in design.

Jan 1, 1986

APPROXIMATELY 3500 people thronged the Hotel Statler from February 18 to 24 for the 173rd general meeting of AIME. It was a technical extravaganza in that 82 technical sessions were held, at which 500 authors presented some 350 papers. Fortunately, Jerry Peirce, outgoing President, didn't have, to preside at all the events although after his year's stint as President, he has more than a nodding acquaintance with some of the latest problems in the mining, metals, and petroleum industries. Although the Welcoming Luncheon on Monday noon was the official opening of the meeting, Local Section Delegates and the Board of Directors convened on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. The large attendance and business like demeanor of these two groups was in accord with the energetic and competent service they have rendered the Institute through the year. To the applause of engineers and their wives who thronged the grand ballroom of the Statler for the Welcoming Luncheon, President Peirce introduced Oliver B. Hopkins, president of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and C. Gerow, secretary of CIM. Dr. Hopkins brought greetings from the CIM and expressed his satisfaction in the splendid spirit of cooperation that exists between the two Institutes. Dr. Hopkins is president, Interprovincial Pipe Line Co., Toronto, and counts as a close personal friend M. L. Haider, who is the 1952 President of AIME and lately of Toronto where he was a director and general manager of Imperial Oil Ltd. Mr. Haider will be known shortly as Mike to thousands of AIME members as he makes his Local Sections presidential tour. There was a pause in luncheon proceedings when Judge Harold R. Medina arrived amid the applause of the audience and somewhat breathless from his trip via motorcade from an antitrust trial against investment bankers at the courthouse downtown. With the Judge at his elbow, President Peirce took the opportunity in his introduction to good humoredly chide the Judge for the vixenish habits of public servants in their treatment of astute businessmen. The successful inventor who patents his inventions is a monopoly; the copper manufacturer who buys his competitors a drink is in collusion; but the business failure need only look to the government for a subsidy, Mr. Peirce pointed out. Judge Medina, quickly captured the admiration of his listeners. He spoke about justice, deploring partisan deals on nominations for judge-

Jan 1, 1952

By Frances H. Clark

IN a concern with the varied interests of the Western Union Telegraph Co., where practically all types of metals, both ferrous and nonferrous, are utilized, many types of failures of materials occur. These have to do not only with outside plant construction, such as corrosion and fatigue of line wire and cable, but also with inside plant equipment operating at such high speeds that rapid deterioration of metal. parts due to fatigue and wear results. Both corrosion and fatigue affect the life of copper wire so its normal life in any particular locality is largely dependent on the atmospheric conditions. Tensions vary widely owing to changes in temperature and ice and wind loadings and the wire is Subject to a great range of vibration caused by wind gusts aril vibration front trains or other heavy vehicles transmitted through the earth. High frequency low-amplitude vibrations are sometimes audible as singing in the wire. The other extreme is the vertical slashing or dancing of the wire observed during severe storms where amplitudes of 9, ft. or more at low frequencies have been observed.

Jan 1, 1942

By Diogo Tenório dos Santos

This property has been studied to characterize the strength a metallic material exhibits when it is machined so it can be regarded as its typical behaviour. As such, it may even be considered as an intrinsic material property. It is usually measured by an index called Coppini index, which is expressed by the ratio between the removed mass of a cutting tool caused by wear when it is used for machining and its initial one for a certain set of machining parameters. In this investigation, the tests were therefore conducted by an established set of parameters, namely feed rate, cutting and depth rates, in which the same wear mechanism took place in both ferrous alloys: AISI 4140 and AISI 316 steels. They were chosen based upon their increasing ordinary machinability indexes. The initial and final mass of the cutting tool were measured by an analytical scale with 0.01 mg precision. Cylindrical rods of 50-mm diameter were machined and the CI indexes showed a remarkable difference between them: 0.080 for the first steel and 0.049 for the second one, i.e., AISI 316 steel presented better machinability than the first one. It was then possible to conclude that this method presents good results in terms of both reproducibility and adequacy for machine shop conditions and it may be applied in a foreseeable future, mainly for metallic materials that have rather low machinability indices.

Jul 31, 2018

By William C. Marshall, Frank G. Norris

THE term "total operation" is meant to include problems that cannot be answered from the standpoint of either the blast furnace or the open hearth separately but must be studied by considering the interrelations of these two processes. There are other ways of expressing this idea, such as reference to the blast furnace and the open hearth as an integrated process or by emphasizing the interrelation and interaction of the two processes. Much progress has been made in metallurgy and other fields by breaking complicated processes and reactions into simpler parts and studying each of these intensively. This intensive study frequently is done under the controlled conditions of the laboratory experiment. The entire process is understood better by this specialized study of each of its parts. This procedure is so satisfactory that an understanding of unit operations is a fundamental requirement of chemical engineering. Much discussion of the open-hearth process is in terms of one heat or one furnace. By this is meant that the conclusions apply to one furnace, wherever it may be. Furnaces seldom occur singly; they are located in groups and these groups are located in steel plants having characteristic blast-furnace equipment. Problems that are affected by the number of furnaces operating, by the number of blast furnaces in the plant and by the fact that the open hearth shop is dependent on the blast-furnace capacity rather than on its own needs for the amount of iron available are among those which, in contrast to "unit operations," we have chosen to call "total operations," Many of these problems, such as charging delays and the general mechanical problem of material handling, are so familiar that merely to define "total operations" brings them to mind. These problems are of such importance that already they have received careful thought and study and probably will merit further study. As will be shown later, these mechanical problems are so intimately related to metallurgical problems of total operations that the effect of certain changes cannot be ascribed with certainty to either a mechanical or a metallurgical cause entirely. Although the problems coming under the general term of "railroading" are included in the problems of total operations, two others are selected for the discussion of this paper. One of these is strictly a problem of composition; the other is strictly a problem of tonnage production. The problem of phosphorus is present whenever basic open-hearth slag is used in the blast-furnace burden. This practice has not secured universal acceptance chiefly because of difference in preference for high-manganese or low-manganese pig iron. If high-manganese (2.00 per cent) iron is to be made, open-hearth slag as a source of manganese is usually cheaper than man

Jan 1, 1943

By G. W. Preckshot, N. G. DeLisle, C. E. Cottrell, D. L. Katz

MOST crude oils contain asphaltic substances that may be naturally or artificially precipitated. In the Greeley field, California, this asphaltic bitumen is precipitated during the flow of the oil from the reservoir to the stock tank. The mechanism of such precipitation is not well understood. This paper presents the progress that has been made by using the electron microscope as a new tool and by observing the effects of the streaming potential on the formation of bitumen particles. Crude oils at atmospheric pressure viewed in the electron microscope in very thin films under a vacuum showed no asphaltic particles. A technique of preparing slides of thin films by dilution of the oil with benzene and washing in petroleum ether was used at first, and these observations showed that the solvents caused the formation of the particles, varying from 0.01 to 0.2 micron in diameter. The electrical effects of fluids flowing through porous solid were studied, with emphasis on the formation of colloidal particles by the streaming potential. The streaming potential of crude oil flowing through sand was measured and was shown to be responsible for the formation of bitumen particles. These results bring out a new phenomenon, which may occur when crude oil flows through the porous oil reservoir.

Jan 1, 1942

By O. C. Wheeler

Peru, if it is judged on a basis of its annual production rate, can be ranked seventh among the oil-producing countries of the Western Hemisphere. In 1945, as in each of the three previous years, the country again produced about 14 million barrels of crude petroleum.

Jan 1, 1946

V. R. GARFIAS,* Palo Alto, Cal. (written discussion?).-Regarding the statement of Mr. Ordoñez, on page 1007, concerning the synclinal curving of sedimentary beds caused by the extrusion of volcanic necks, that "this phenomenon might occur, but it is not fully proved in our fields," I beg to reply that the funnel and anticlinal-ring structure is actually associated with igneous intrusions in the Mexican oil fields, as we were able to ascertain by plotting an underground contour map and making a structural model of the oil-bearing beds of the Ebano field. E. DE GOLFER, New York, N. Y. (written discussion?).-The paper under discussion is not only of interest in connection with its subject but it is a contribution of considerable importance to our knowledge of the possible effect of igneous rocks upon the accumulation of petroleum in the Mexican fields.

Jan 10, 1918

By Kenneth N. Weaver

Portland cement can be made from relatively abundant industrial minerals and rocks, and this may explain why cement producers placed little emphasis on geology during the early days of the industry. After World War II, however, the industry began to recognize the need for geological exploration, and some of the larger companies began to build a permanent geological staff. This development had its roots in the following factors: Rapid expansion of the industry; closing of many cement plants due to inadequate raw materials; necessity for upgrading the quality of portland cement; and the increasingly large capital investment required to build new cement plants, which in turn, required a higher degree of accuracy in reserve calculations. Whereas the geologist's function during the active expansion of capacity was primarily in exploration, one of his major functions today is the development of existing reserves.

Jan 1, 1965

By Wayne A. McCurdy

For the third consecutive year, predicted increases in coal production and consumption failed to materialize. Production of bituminous, sub-bituminous and lignite coal for 1961 was estimated by the U.S. Bureau of Mines at 400 million tons, a drop of 15,- 512,000 tons from the 1960 figure. Anthracite production for the year was 17.8 million tons compared to 18.8 million tons produced in 1960. Consumption figures are expected to show a proportionate decline. Of coal's major markets, only electric utilities showed an increase-and even here the increase of approximately 2% was smaller than had been expected. Major cause of relatively low consumption was a decrease of more than 20% in the use of metallurgical coal for making coke. Reductions of lesser importance were registered in general industrial, retail, and export markets.

Jan 2, 1962

By Stuart Buckley

THE application of hydrocarbon equilibrium data to various problems encountered in refining and in natural gasoline recovery is an old and well established practice. Both generalized data and data on specific hydro-carbon systems have been made available by a number of investigators. More recently such data have been applied to the relations governing the separation of oil and gas both in the reservoir and at the surface. Most of the applications to production problems, however, have been based upon examinations of surface samples of oil and gas. This paper describes a technique that has been used satisfactorily in a number of cases to calculate directly from the hydrocarbon analysis of and auxiliary laboratory data on a subsurface sample of the reservoir fluid the behavior of the oil and gas during the various stages of separation at the surface incident to production.

Jan 1, 1938

By Dever Ashmead

ANTHRACITE was first mined in the Wyoming Valley and sold as an article of commerce in 1808. As some preparation has always been necessary to make it ready to burn, the preparation of anthracite must date back over a hundred years. Two vital factors have determined to a large extent the degree and method of anthracite preparation. These are, first, the character of the beds worked and the methods by which they were mined and, second, the equipment used and practices followed in the burning of the coal. It is not the intention here to go deeply into these phases of preparation as a paper of no mean length could be prepared on the history of either. Rather, the intention here is to point out the main considerations and to show the influence they have exerted on the preparation of anthracite. MINING METHODS AND THEIR RELATION TO PREPARATION In the beginning f the nineteenth century, the coal beds were virgin with the possible exception of some outcroppings that had been worked, to a slight extent, by the Indians. It is known that the American aborigines had a knowledge of the use of this fuel, because when the Wyoming Valley was purchased from them, in 1754, they mentioned the fact that, by selling the land, they would lose their coal.

Jan 9, 1921

By Richard D. Love

Competition in the aggregate industry of the 90's will be an over increasing really. With this in mind a quarry manager should always be comparing new and innovative concepts to increase productivity and reduce operating costs. In this paper, the author will present a comprehensive history of a drilling and blasting program that achieves these results. By employing proven methods and implementing new concepts, this program was proven to be a success over a ten year period.

Jan 1, 1991

By A. D. Kennedy

No major breakthroughs in concentration technology were made during the year, but solid advances were made in engineering. Perhaps the most significant was the growing acceptance of the unified or "systems approach" to mineral extraction, processing, refining, transportation and marketing. Under the systems approach, transportation is no longer some- one else's business, but a high cost item within the planning engineer's purview. The Savage River pipeline 1,2 and the Marconaflo process3,4 for land and ocean transport of iron ore slurry, are examples showing that evaluation of transportation as part of a unitized system can lead to innovation, and the determination of the physical location of some of the operations. There is even speculation that the cost reductions possible by ocean transport of iron ore slurry may bring in more plants using direct-reduction steelmaking processes.4 Some perennial problems can be solved by application of the systems approach; for example, under this concept the replacement of three small shovels in the pit with two larger shovels is not permissible on the basis of lower operating costs; the resulting change in ore blending upon metallurgical performance must first be evaluated to prove whether or not the change is economically beneficial to the entire operation (perhaps new storage-blending facilities will be indicated).

Jan 1, 1970

By Michael Karmis

The International Conference on Sustainable Development Indicators in the Mineral Industries(SDIMI 2003) was held May 21-23, 2003 on the island of Milos, Greece. The objective of this international conference was to assist the mining and minerals industries in their global transition to sustainable development. The main theme of the conference was the development, monitoring and assessment of sustainable development criteria for mineral operations. Emerging technologies were also presented that can assist in the development of criteria and performance indicators.

Jan 1, 2003

By F. H. Deily

The petroleum industry has developed and utilized many aspects of rock mechanics, both in its search for petroleum and in its drilling and production operations. Geological exploration activities have been improved by knowledge of earth tectonic forces. Better understanding of seismic wave motion has contributed to a more accurate interpretation of geophysical data. Drilling activities have benefited from basic knowledge of rock strength behavior under in situ conditions. Production has been significantly increased through stimulation techniques, such as hydraulic fracturing. The ability of rock mechanics work to contribute to future petroleum activities will depend upon the development of knowledge of rock properties under greater depths and at higher pressures and temperatures.

Jan 1, 1969

At a time when Congressional stiffening of health and safety regulations in the nation's coal mines seems all but an afterthought, when the problems confronting both mine operator and worker are being tossed about like a pigskin in an Australian- rules football match, what could be more appropriate to the times than to incorporate a discussion on these matters into the proceedings of an annual coal meeting. Integration of both technical and topical discussion provided the strength for this 28th Annual Meeting of the Central Appalachian Section of the AIME, convened at the The Greenbrier, White. Sulphur Springs. W. Va., Oct. 31-Nov. 1. Three technical sessions prepared for the occasion were served to those in attendance. First of these was held on Friday morning. Rendered excellent coverage, topics included Roof Structure Analysis at Blacksville No. I, presented by David Eyer, Christopher Coal Co.; Methane Monitors (evolution and evaluation of present day detection equipment); and Instantaneous Control Reaction to Mine Fires and Explosions, in which Elmer A. Fike illustrated the point quite vividly by showing a film on the potential of such control equipment. Indeed, the ability to snuff out a mine fire before it is allowed to spread even beyond its own igniting sparks speaks very well for itself. However, Fike hastened to point out that certain difficulties had to be overcome before these "fire watchers" could be implemented successfully in mines. These "bugs," inherent in virtually all coal mining environments, include ignition of sulfur pockets on mine facings and delivery of sparks on trolley rails, both of which may impede the accuracy of such control monitors.

Jan 12, 1969

By A Stasi, B Brice

Water is a limited and precious resource in Australia. Because of the increasing demand for water from all sectors of the economy and the variability in supply, efficient management of water resources is of vital importance. The national water reform agenda has provided a strong impetus to all states and territories to progressively move towards more efficient and sustainable water management. The Queensland Water Act 2000 is the legislative framework for providing water for the environment and for planning for the security of supply to water users. The comprehensive water planning process prescribed in the Act results in new tradeable water allocations that are separate from land. These water allocations are well specified and can be traded on a permanent or temporary basis. Trading of water allows it to move to its highest value use, thereby encouraging the most efficient distribution of this limited resource. In addition to transferring ownership of water allocations, it is also possible to change the attributes of the allocation, such as the location from which water may be taken. Changes to water allocations are subject to approval from the resource manager. Pre-testing allows for certain changes to be approved very quickly, making the trading process more streamlined and cost effective. Temporary trades, or seasonal water assignments, currently account for the majority of water trades in Queensland. However, permanent trading activity is expanding steadily as old water entitlements are converted to tradeable water allocations and as the market matures. The permanent trading market provides significant opportunities to the mining sector. It allows mining companies to buy water allocations at market prices without compromising environmental outcomes or causing third party impacts.

Jan 1, 2006