Mine visits in NW Queensland with JOGMEC and the Department of Resources

The Queensland Department of Resources and the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) are engaged with the Sustainable Minerals Institute’s (SMI) Mine Waste Transformation through Characterisation (MIWATCH) in a research project focused on the metallurgical processing and recovery of cobalt from mine tailings at the Rocklands Mine, in Queensland's North-West region.

This project kicked off late 2021, however with travel restrictions now well and truly over, the JOGMEC team finally had the opportunity to visit Australia, the project site, and others, ahead of the Queensland summer.

The party of seven, led by Anita Parbhakar-Fox, Helen Degeling (Department of Resources) and Laura Jackson, visited Rocklands, Mt Isa mines, Ernest Henry and Capricorn Copper mines. Through MIWATCH’s research in Queensland’s North-West minerals province, cobalt has been identified within pyrite therefore an objective of the trip was to understand the movement of this mineral through the processing plants visited and its behaviour in tailings storage facilities.

The collaborative project is seeking to find new, or fine tune existing, metallurgical methods to recover cobalt from tailings with a current focus on modifying traditional separation methods (i.e. flotation). On return to Brisbane, JOGMEC met with our colleagues in SMI’s Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre’s Flotation Chemistry program, led by Associate Professor Liza Forbes, to exchange ideas and discuss their new results. We hope this leads to more technical collaborations in the future.

We thank all the teams at Copper Resources Australia, Evolution Mining, Glencore and 29 Metals for their hospitality.