Newmont Mining Corporation

Cajamarca, Peru

There’s no question that the price of silver is on the rise. As a result, the Solutions and Innovation team and the Yanacocha operations team are collaborating on a method for recovering silver from Yanacocha’s heap leach pads. These heaps are thought to contain in excess of 300 million ounces of silver, or about $13 billion worth at today’s commodity prices.

The leaching process primarily recovers gold from the heaps leaving silver behind. In-house research in this area continues to progress. This year Discovery and Development’s Innovation team brought in some additional resources to generate novel ideas about how extraction might be done in a safe, cost-effective and environmentally friendly manner.

Supplementing the in-house research already being done, the Innovation team placed the challenge in front of SynecticsWorld, a consulting firm specializing in innovation processes, and Nine Sigma, a top-ranking innovation service provider.

The challenge is to identify and recover trace amounts of silver that are often encapsulated in, or combined with, other minerals within the heaps. Conventional methods of extraction, including crushing, grinding and leaching at very high concentrations of fluid, are not viable options even at today’s record-high silver prices.

In March, the Innovation team helped address this challenge through interactive invention sessions using a methodology advocated by SynecticsWorld, which facilitated the work. Approximately 26 Newmont employees, a dozen external experts and some facilitators gathered initially in Lima, Peru, and later in Denver, Colorado, to participate in the Silver Recovery Innovation Campaign. Through the four week campaign, they applied innovative thinking tactics such as curiosity, speculation, developmental thinking, experimentation and more.

“We had a lot of reasons for doing this work“, said Kirsten Benefiel, former director of Innovation. “First, we were able to cast a wide net and test several methods for generating potential solutions, and later consider how well those solutions would work for Newmont. Second, we demonstrated how innovation, when used as a process, could contribute to Newmont’s culture.

As a result of carrying out the Silver Recovery campaign, we came up with some great proposals, and participants seemed to learn a lot about what it means to think innovatively. I expect those lessons learned will continue to be applied in the normal course of their work activities.”

Campaign participants included team members from Business Opportunity Delivery, Innovation, Metallurgy, Technical & Scientific Systems, Corporate Development, Supply Chain Management, Exploration, Human Resources, Legal and Operations.

A different approach was taken with Nine Sigma. This company broadcasts a request for proposals to provide or lead to a solution to a specific problem — in this case, silver recovery. From this request, more than 40 proposals were received and are currently being evaluated by Newmont’s Innovation team for consideration.

In April, the Innovation team presented its current results to members of the Executive Leadership Team. The Innovation team is excited about the outcomes from these experiences and looks forward to sharing more details as it continues to support and address prospective challenges related to innovation across Newmont.

September 6, 2011