New and Newsworthy on InfoMine

New mines have been published on MineSite.

Five AngloGold Ashanti gold mines include: Sunrise Dam in Australia, AGA Mineracao in Brazil, Cerro Vanguardia in Argentina, Cripple Creek & Victor in the United States and Geita in Tanzania.

Four Teck Resources mines now available are: Carmen de Andacollo (copper gold mine) in Chile, Quebrada Blanca in Chile, Duck Pond (copper zinc mine) in Canada and Pend Oreille (zinc mine) in the U.S.

MineSite is the most comprehensive and reliable information source of world leading operating mines. It provides summarized information on production, ownership, deposit type, reserve, mining method, processing method, mine life, mining and processing equipment, and contacts.  Each mine also includes detailed information on location, geology, operations, processing, as well as environmental and social issues in the region.

MineSite is being updated regularly with new mines and ensuring information up-to-date.

InfoMine will be at the Mineral Exploration Roundup on Jan 25th and 26th in Vancouver, BC. Come by booth F5 for a demo of the InfoMine website.

You can also enter our draw for a chance to win your choice of:

• An InfoMine Annual Standard Subscription
• An EduMine Annual Standard Subscription
• 6 months advertising as a Featured Mining Company

James V. Reyes-Picknell provides expert advice on strategy, processes, process improvement, human and business transformation in his popular webcast Uptime – Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management. This webcast will introduce you to successful practices that will reduce equipment failures, the associated maintenance costs and risks to safety, environmental compliance, and business performance. You will also learn how to transition from reactive to proactive management, and identify
what you can do today to make a change.

The three-day webcast will be held March 6 - 8, 2012, and you can attend from anywhere! For more information or to register, see the course website.

Register before February 7th to receive a 10% Early Bird discount!

InfoMine will be at the upcoming Vancouver Resource Investment Conference on January 22-23rd at booth 733. It is taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Come by and drop off your business card for a chance to win your choice of:

• An InfoMine Annual Standard Subscription
• An EduMine Annual Standard Subscription
• 6 months advertising as a Featured Mining Company

Rio Tinto’s GDP EduMine Campus provides all graduates free access to EduMine as part of their two-year graduate development program! Designed to assist graduates in the development of technical expertise related to their work, this campus offers a vast array of self-paced e-learning programs specifically for those in the mining sector. This content will be of interest to both technical and functional graduates in all disciplines.

EduMine delivers topical, relevant professional development, training and technology to the worldwide mining community, authored by industry specialists. See the Rio Tinto GDP Campus on EduMine for more information.

Alastair Sinclair’s popular short course on Quality Control of Assays is coming up this spring - March 15, 16 - and there’s still time to register for the Early Bird Discount!

In recent years there has been a strong international movement toward knowing and improving the quality of information used in the Mining Industry for resource/reserve estimation. Topics to be discussed in this course include: duplicate data collection, use of standards and blanks, simple statistics in the evaluation of standards, recognition of outliers, binary graphs as an interpretive aid to evaluating duplicate data, and displaying and analyzing data.

For more information or to register, see the course page.

This month’s featured publication is the book of proceedings from the Tailings and Mine Waste 2011 Conference, held in November 2011 in Vancouver. The book includes about 70 proceedings addressing important issues facing the mining industry today.
A complete set of the papers can also be accessed at www.infomine.com/publications/ and at circle.ubc.ca.

Please note, there is only a limited quantity of the book available.

Fourteen teams of students from nine U.S., Canadian and Indian mining universities participated in Phase I of the 2011-2012 Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME)/National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (NSSGA) Student Design Competition. The judging of Phase I is complete and six teams are advancing. Every year students offer creative solutions to the design problem and this year was no exception. Many companies provide support for the Student Design Contest and CostMine and InfoMine are proud to be a part of this unique opportunity. Congratulations to all of the students for a job well done!

In Phase I, students were provided data and required to complete a comprehensive mine design and written report. A panel of mining professionals judged the entries. Teams were provided access to CostMine’s Equipment Cost Calculator as a project resource.

Teams advancing to Phase II will compete at the 2012 SME Annual Meeting held in Seattle, Washington. At the Phase II competition, teams are given a new design problem which must be solved in 48 hours and then presented live to the judges and audience at the competition.

The teams advancing in no particular order are:

1. McGill University – 5M & Associates
2. McGill University – CFP Consulting
3. University of Nevada‐Reno – Herlocker Aggregates
4. Virginia Tech – Riverstone Aggregates
5. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur – Bharat Khanitras
6. Missouri University of Science & Technology – Team A (Midwest Consultants)

CostMine provides Mining Cost Service, Mine & Mill Equipment Costs: An Estimator’s Guide, and labor compensation surveys to the participants during the competition. The winning team will take home a subscription to Mining Cost Service and access to Edumine. Mining Cost Service is the mining industry’s primary source of current information on the cost of mining equipment, labor, supplies, transportation, smelting and other data needed for mining prefeasibility studies.

Senior exploration geologists in the U.S. earn a whopping 70% less than their Australian counterparts and 16% less than their Canadian colleagues when converted to US dollar equivalents. Sounds terrible right? However, senior geologists in the U.S. bring home an average of US$98K annually, hardly a pittance. Australian geologists have been enjoying the benefits of a booming mining industry and it shows. Our 2011 International Exploration Salaries, Wages and Benefits survey revealed that the average Australian senior geologist makes about A$166K per year and the Canadian counterpart makes an average of C$113K annually. In previous years, this disparity was reversed with Americans making 20% to 50% more. Clearly the weak American economy and exchange rates are reflected in these results.

A notable result of this year’s survey, which covered 129 exploration offices in 38 countries worldwide, was how well the South American nationals fared compared to global averages. South American senior geologists earned nearly as much as the Canadians and more than the Americans, bringing home an average of US$102K annually.

The survey results containing salary and benefit plan summaries for 129 exploration offices can be purchased from CostMine. Click here for more information. Or call us: +1 (509) 328-8023. Price US$945 + s/h.

The 2011 results of CostMine’s US Metal & Industrial Mineral Mine Salaries, Wages and Benefits Survey and the US Coal Mine Salaries Wages, and Benefits Survey will be released later this month.

In 2010, mines from 17 states participated in the US Coal Mine Report.  Included were wages and benefit information for 67 mines and salary information for 43 mines.  Mines from 28 states participater in the 2010 US Metal & Industrial Mineral Mine Report.  Wage and benefit information for 119 mines and salary information for 95 mines wasprovided.  The 2011 reports promise similar results. 

Survey reports, including actual wage and salary scales, benefit plan profiles, and bonus plans for many of the participating mines, can be purchased here or by calling +1 509-328-8023.