Top ten lists for metallurgical and mineral processing engineers

"This article is an attempt to capture a presentation given at the 2016 SME Mineral & Metallurgical Processing Division (MPD) Luncheon held on Feb. 24, 2016, in Phoenix, AZ. It was presented as a tongue-in-cheek, lighthearted view of several of the issues facing our industry, while identifying some of the challenges and opportunities available to new engineers entering the industry today.Disclaimer• What you are about to read includes personal preferences, biases and occasionally arbitrary opinions.• Some readers may have dissimilar opinions on the contents and/or the rank order of the lists.There are eight top ten lists offered in this article: (1) Industry realities (2) Things a metallurgical or mineral process engineering graduate should do (3) Books every metallurgist should have on their shelf (4) Things I wish I had known (5) Legends of metallurgy (posthumous, with highlights) (6) Things we’ve forgotten (7) Mineral processing innovations of the past 20 years and, finally, (8) The future? For some items, additional context or clarification is provided after the item, while for other items no further explanation is warranted and none is offered. Top 10 industry realities1. Metal price cycles.2. Bigger is better (except when it isn’t).3. Ore grades declining across the board of metals/commodities.4. Ores becoming more complex.5. Three-fold increase in capital costs between 2004 and 2015.6. Three-fold increase in operating costs between 2004 and 2015.7. Less capital availability/challenging financial markets.8. Environmental constraints increasing.9. Socio-political constraints increasing.10. The mine manager is always impossible to work with.As Table 1 shows, there was more than a three-fold increase in gold operating costs between 2004 and 2014. The increases for copper, iron ore and other commodities were similar."