In this issue
Skillings Mining Review December 2024: our cover feature, Wired for Success, shows how smarter blasting—sensors, AI timing, digital twins, and data-linked explosives—is lifting recovery, reducing dilution, and cutting energy use downstream. Around the pit, process innovation accelerates: Metso’s hydrometallurgy offering, smarter design & resource optimization, and rising cybersecurity stakes as more plants go connected.
Markets keep moving: a record gold discovery in China shakes up expectations; tariff plans threaten to reshape industrial metals; HRC steel sits at the center of Europe’s industrial transformation; and a widening copper supply gap fuels M&A. Field notes include VR Resources surveys in Ontario, Carnaby–Glencore teaming up, Botswana’s rough-diamond certification point, and Greenland investment momentum.
We round out with people and risk—workforce development trends, leadership conversations, and a report warning deep-sea mining could jeopardize large export earnings—plus our 2024 Annual Index, stats, and sustainability indicators to close the year with clarity.
