May 2014
MODERN MINING
39
COMPANIES
of functionality can deliver substantial savings.
Say you chase an 85 % recovery in your gold
plant, for example, as opposed to 92 %. Yes,
you lose 7 % of your potential recovery but your
capital costs to build the plant might go down
by 50 %. We’re not afraid to say to a client, ‘You
don’t need that, it doesn’t make you money.’ We
look at every unit process and ask, does it add
to the bottom line of the business? We find our
junior clients in particular are very receptive to
this approach, as they typically have projects
that many majors would consider marginal.”
Clarke also holds strong views on the mine
development cycle from exploration through to
commissioning. “The standard route to imple-
mentation involves evaluation of the resource,
at least one conceptual or scoping study, pre-
feasibility and feasibility studies, financing,
construction, and finally commissioning and
production,” he says. “This whole process can
typically take eight years, sometimes longer.
Frankly, this is crazy, particularly for juniors.
We are developing a model that can dramati-
cally compress these activities without any loss
of value or any reduction in standards.”
When PPM was founded, the original team
– including Clarke – had a mostly De Beers
background and the company was identified as
a diamond mining specialist. Since then, PPM
has moved on. “We’ve now worked with 17
commodities, including gold, platinum, copper,
zinc, uranium, tin, iron ore, ferrochrome, coal
and tantalite,” Clarke points out. “Diamonds
are still important to us and we have completed
over 50 projects involving this commodity, but
our order book is currently very diverse with
diamonds only accounting for a relatively small
proportion of our work.”
He adds that PPM has also seen a shift in the
geographical location of the projects it works
Above:
The vertical shaft at
Kalagadi Manganese’s new
underground mine near
Hotazel in the Northern
Cape, where PPM is
currently working.
Left:
The PPM team. The
staff complement numbers
about 20 people.
on. “At one stage, the bulk of our work was
concentrated in South Africa and Botswana
but currently we only have one major contract
in South Africa and none in Botswana. We’re
doing much more work in West Africa of late,
