Towards integrated geometallurgical approach: Critical review of current practices and future trends

Geometallurgy has become an important tool for mitigating production risks and improving economic performance in the modern mining industry. Multiple definitions and visions of geometallurgy have been proposed during the last decades. Most of them define geometallurgy as a bridge between geology and mineral processing. Such a definition is rather confusing since process mineralogy claims to be such bridge too. Therefore, the main objective of the present paper is to provide a broad image of geometallurgy covering planning, executing and evaluation of geometallurgical programs. Such a vision of geometallurgy was developed within a research project PREP, which was aimed at resource effective mineral processing. PREP is a holistic geometallurgical approach independent of deposit type. The approach differentiates geometallurgical programs based on the complexity of the problem and the desirable outcome. Particular attention was paid to the planning of the geometallurgical programs, data management, and new tools development. The practical usage of the approach was tested with three case studies: iron-apatite ore, VMS, and Cu porphyry deposits. Some examples of applying geometallurgy for the iron-apatite ore are shown in this paper. The result, the guidelines on planning, executing and evaluating a geometallurgical program, are given in this paper.