 This is Anna Adamek in Vancouver, August 30th 2017. Could you give me your name and where you were born? My name is Chris Fleming. I was born in Zimbabwe. It used to be called Rhodesia in Southern Africa. Were your parents involved in science or did they encourage you to go into science? No, my father was a lawyer and my mother was a state home mother. So when did you become interested in metallurgy or minerals? I didn't really become interested in metallurgy at school. I did sciences at school and at university and in my last I got at a PhD degree at university and I had sponsorship from a mining organization and they gave me a job and that was our into the mining business. You did your PhD in Cape Town. Why this university? So why did you choose that university? Well where I grew up in Zimbabwe there was only one university and at that time they weren't very strong in the sciences or the engineering so most students went to South African universities and I liked the idea of going to Cape Town. So your first job was in South Africa? What was it? Could you tell me? The company that gave me a bursary for my PhD was a semi-government research organization called Mintec. So I went to work for them when I finished my PhD and I stayed with them for 16 years until I came to Canada. Why did you decide to move to Canada? I was off for the job. What was it? I was in my time at Mintec and a lot of my research was in gold processing and I came to Canada in 1990 and in 1998 I had been invited to Canada to speak at a course that the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy was holding for a new process that we've been quite involved in developing in South Africa called the carbon and pop process. But I came over to Canada to that it was a MetSoc meeting in Winnipeg in 1988 and I presented this course and soon after that I heard from a recruiting company who approached me to see if I'd be interested in coming to Canada. So the company that was trying to recruit me was Falconbridge and they had a division Lakefield research and they could see that the gold industry was exploding worldwide and they wanted to get a leapfrog into the gold business and they figured they could do that by bringing me over to Canada. Just to go back then, you mentioned the research that actually I guess made your career. Can you talk about that a bit more? Sure, it was a carbon and pop process. I've done a lot of work in gold processing in the 1970s and then carbon and pop process was actually developed in the United States but it never went very far in the United States. There was one quite small plant in Homestake in North Dakota. Our people at Mintec had visited that plant and saw the potential for it and back at Mintec in South Africa we started doing some work on the process and particularly some of the mechanical practical aspects to adapt it to very large scale operations because the plants in South Africa were very big. So we did this development work at Mintec. I was part of a small team that was involved in the development work and then basically introducing it to the gold mining companies in South Africa and they embraced it very quickly. It took off between 1981 and 1985. Five or six big plants were built in South Africa. The gold industry has always been very collaborative. So gold miners were coming from around the world to see what was happening in South Africa. In the late 1980s the process spread to Australia, Canada, the United States. Pop plants were being built everywhere and in a remarkably short period of time, in about 10 years, the gold industry changed from the old process that was called the Meryl Pro process to carbon and pop. Almost all the new plants were being built with carbon and pop. So it was that carbon and pop process that was the subject of the short course in Winnipeg that they asked me to come and speak at. So what was your role in developing of that process? So I'm a process chemist and I've learned a lot of engineering on the job. So I was able to go back into the fundamentals of the process. They weren't well understood. The plants were built and they were operated and they operated quite successfully without people really knowing much about what made it work. That was my role. I did a lot of fundamental research on the adsorption. I learned how to model the process so it would make it easier to design new plants, but based on the fundamentals of the process. So that was my strength and my contribution to that team. Who would you consider your mentor? My first boss, when I joined MINTEC in 1974, was a guy called Mike Nicoll. A very, very smart guy. He was also a chemist and I worked side by side with him. We published many papers together and when I left university, I thought I knew everything. When I got to MINTEC and met Mike Nicoll, I realized I knew nothing. But he mentored me tremendously. So I gave him most of the credit for whatever I became subsequently. So in the 1990s you moved to Canada. Did you find any differences between the research culture in South Africa and in Canada at the time? Yeah, I came from MINTEC which was a research organization. It was mostly funded by government. So they did a lot of research, it was applied research that needed to have some practical outcome, but it was financed by government. So they could take a long range view on research. When I came to Canada, I joined Lakefield Research, which despite the name was not a research organization. They provided testing services to mining companies and very seldom did research. Only if there was a real problem in the approach that they were taking or the flow sheet that they were developing, they might get some funding to do a little bit of research to try and solve the problem. But they were not a research organization. So that was the biggest change. I also moved into more of a management role, managing the business. So that became more my reason for going to work every day than doing fundamental research. But I maintained an interest throughout my career at Lakefield Research on the technical side. And I've continued to write technical papers and do research. But it's been a lot more difficult because in a commercial testing laboratory, that's never your highest priority. So what responsibilities did you take on at Lakefield? So I came in 1990 to Canada. In 1992, I became the general manager of the Lakefield facility, or Lakefield Research. That was our only facility in the village of Lakefield in Ontario. We had about 120 employees. And for five years, that was my job until, not even five years, until 1995. So I was reporting to Falconbridge. They owned us. And in 1995, I learned that through the man I was reporting to in Falconbridge, who was a very well-known Canadian medallist called Larry Sealy, that Falconbridge might be interested in selling Lakefield Research. And if I could get my act together, they might be interested in selling it to the management group. So I worked with Larry Sealy. He was initially responsible for selling the company to work out a deal that would be acceptable to Falconbridge. And once the two of us had worked out that deal, Larry sort of declared his conflict of interest and said that he would like to actually join me at Lakefield Research. So Falconbridge was quite happy with that arrangement. It was a good deal. They didn't want us to pay so much for the company that we would go bankrupt, but it had to be a fair price. So we worked that out. Larry and I did. Larry immediately left Falconbridge and joined me and we became a private company. So what was your relationship then with industry or with academia as a private company, private research company? It was the same relationship. Although we were owned by Falconbridge, we'd always worked at arm's length because we provide services to the mining community at large. And even we did work for other nickel mining companies who might have been seen to be in competition with Falconbridge. They were quite happy for us to work for them. So it was a very unique relationship for a company that was owned by a mining company that allowed us to work in that way. So changing to a private company never changed that client base in any way. We continued to work with them. Falconbridge certainly in those initial days was a major client of ours, but certainly not our only client. They maybe gave us 10% or 15% of our business. So we worked mostly for Canadian companies in those early years. One of the reasons why we expanded and we did expand very rapidly was that in the mid-1990s there was the sentiment towards mining was not good in Canada. There were, I think the government in BC was very anti-mining and even Ontario was not very favorable. So up until then a lot of our business had been coming from Canadian companies and we felt vulnerable. Canadian mining companies were moving overseas. They still kept their head office in Toronto or Vancouver, but they were starting to spend money overseas in exploration and we felt that if we were to remain viable as a private company we needed to follow them. So in the only six or seven years that we were a private company we grew very rapidly, geographically. We started up laboratories in all the major mining companies of the world. And that was Larry's responsibility mostly. I mean we had a shared responsibility in that sort of strategic growth area. My responsibility was more on the operation side. So he was the chief executive officer and he went out there and grew the company very rapidly and gave me the responsibility of running all those acquisitions and integrating them into our global network. So we started up in quite short order laboratories in Santiago and Chile, Johannesburg, South Africa, Perth, Australia, Gullhove's Ranch in Brazil and we started a small laboratory in Lima, Peru. So just in those four or five years it was crazy busy. It was exciting. Very interesting. But also quite scary. What were some of the projects that you worked on? They were quite sort of geographically focused. A lot of our work in our Western Australian laboratory in Perth was related to nickel naturants. That was a rapidly growing business in Australia. So it was mostly hydro metallurgy related to base metals. In South Africa, a lot of the work we were doing in our laboratory there was gold, gold base, quite naturally. Chile was mostly copper. Also copper and gold. So a business in the Lakefield site grew very rapidly as well despite the fact that we were setting up this global network and how it sort of turned up was that our laboratories around the world became very good feeders for project group coming back to Canada. So we would do the sort of scoping level studies, the preliminary studies in our regional laboratories and once we got to piloting they tended to come back to Canada. So despite setting up this network of laboratories around the world which might have seemed to be chasing business away from Canada during that time we grew from about just over 100 employees to nearly 400 employees at the Lakefield site in Canada. So it was very good for our business in Canada. What was the recipe for success then? We had, we've always had a very, the Lakefield site was the flagship. That was where all the expertise was. It's a lovely place to live and we've had a very low staff turnover there because of that. So particularly our senior engineers, our experienced pilot point operators have been with us for 23 years. So I think that combination of knowledge and experience made us very powerful technically and able to tackle very diverse projects and metallurgical challenges that were coming from around the world. We've always also been able to respond to whatever market forces have demanded based on the business cycle, based on different commodities. We work on just about every element in the periodic table at different times. So we've been able to stay reasonably busy through the down cycle because even in the down cycle something is going well. I think as a, we're now 70 years old. So we already at that time had a very long history in the service business. And in the service business you have to be able to respond to what your client wants. You've got to be able to do quickly. Just good project management. And then 2002 I believe? 2002? Yes. So we're only a private company for seven years. And then SGS came knocking. SGS is a very big multidisciplinary global company based in Geneva. They've got 10 different business lines, very strong geographic presence around the world, something like 400 offices and laboratories. They were relatively weak in the minerals area and particularly weak in our area, which was consulting, testing, flow sheet development. And I think that they just felt that they could really leapfrog into that business sector by making an acquisition. So they came knocking in 2002. Initially we weren't that keen. They understood we were quite stressful during that rapidly, but it was also quite exciting. We'd also just come out of a couple of quite tough years and we could see the good times coming. So it wasn't the best time for us to be selling because we had a couple of tough years. So SGS came back at us two or three times before we eventually agreed to sort of on the table and discuss selling the company. But you remained with the company? So and you still managed the network of laboratories? So it was not really written into the deal. It was a handshake between me and the CEO of SGS through Sergio Marchione that I would stay on for five years and continue doing what I had been doing. It wasn't really a role for Larry anymore in that kind of executive role, because that was a function that could be taken over by SGS, but they felt they needed me to stick around to try and keep running this network of laboratories that we'd set up. So that was part of the deal. I agreed on a handshake to stay in my role. I've got a new title of I think vice president, global metallurgical operations on the hunt. But basically kept on doing the same thing for five years. So did your goals change at all? Not really during that time. It was obviously different, you know, running your own show compared to fitting into a very big multinational organization. Certainly in the first couple of years they allowed us to do what we had been doing. But slowly they started fitting this round peg into their square hole and we had to change some of our reporting structures and particularly back office support. Whereas we'd done everything ourselves out of Lakefield, we started reporting to different divisions of SGS around the world for financial support and HR support and stuff like that. So that from a management point of view was challenging, that transition. But from a main business perspective, nothing really changed. It certainly helped us to be part of this global SGS network. And in particular, what one of our business lines was mineral analysis, geochem analysis. We had a very big laboratory in Lakefield and somewhat smaller geochem analysis laboratories in our other metallurgical lab. The main function was to support our metallurgical business. Although the manager of our analytical group had started getting into custom analytical specifically for their own clients, not really related to metallurgical projects. And that side of the business grew very rapidly. So that guy, his name is Russ Koehler. He's a vice president of SGS in charge of their global geochem laboratories is now responsible for about 130 laboratories around the world. So that mineral analysis part of the business grew very rapidly and it grew under the SGS umbrella. So certainly they helped us on that side big time by being part of that much bigger organization. And our metallurgical business has also grown. Since the acquisition by SGS, we've started up metallurgical laboratories in Eastern Russia and Chita. Right here in Vancouver, Toronto, so the metallurgical world has grown too. Is there an innovation or a set of innovations that you are especially proud of? Yeah, I guess in that part of my day to day work that wasn't managing the business where I stayed involved in the technology side, I tend to get drawn into our projects that have technical challenges. So there's probably a disproportionate amount of research type thinking or effort that goes into my consulting. And I have been involved in a number of technical innovations, part of a team always, but just throwing in ideas and directions in which the team should go. It's interesting that probably the two technologies that I've been involved in developing that have been most successful as far as commercialization is concerned are technologies that were made freely available to the mining industry. We didn't try and own them and we didn't try and sell them. We just sorted them out, published them and said, go for it, you can have it. So the first one was the CRP process. So no one burns any royalties or any intellectual property rights as far as that process concerned them. I believe that at least was part of the reason why it spread and grew so rapidly. The other one is a much smaller process that I was involved in developing called the SART process. That was a process for dealing with high levels of cyanide soluble copper in the gold industry. And it's a very neat way of breaking the copper cyanide complex, recovering the copper as a product that you can sell and recycling the cyanide back into the process. That has put that significant economic impact. We did that work for Tech, actually for a Canadian mining company, Tech. Whenever we had like the research was involved in developing new technology, the client who paid for the work had the right to own it, to patent it, to publish it, to do whatever they wanted. Tech decided that they didn't want to own it, they worked in the technology business certainly at that stage. So we published it myself and the Tech represented on that project, published it and basically by publishing it made it available to the industry. There are now I think nine or ten SART plants that have been built around the world. So I'm involved in the development of other technologies to generally own by the mining companies and the mining companies have patented it and tried to keep it to themselves without a sell it and that hasn't been nearly successful. But mining companies I find don't like to pay for technology. What was the most difficult project that you work on or something that you would consider a failure? Well, that's not necessarily both the same thing. I think the most difficult projects we work on today are refractory gold projects. There have been a number of sessions at this conference dealing with that. The gold doors are getting more complex. They're getting more difficult to release and liberate the gold. You've got to do more pre-processing before you can recover the gold and that's all expensive. The gold grades are getting lower and lower. So the challenge of economically recovering gold is growing and they're all exciting projects to work on and they all require little bits of innovation here and there. Otherwise, that deposit stays in the ground, maybe waiting for the gold prices a lot higher. So they're a lot of fun for us in the technology development business. They're not much fun for the owners of those deposits. But that's probably where the greatest challenges are today. That's sort of the, they call them refractory gold where gold is locked up in the sulphide matrix and you have to break that matrix in order to release the gold. It's expensive and if a cheaper way of doing that could be found, that's sort of the holy grail in gold processing now, because a significant percentage of the known gold resources in the ground today fall into that category. And not enough research has been done in that area unfortunately. Did maybe changing perceptions, changing societal perceptions or environmental movements have any impact on your work? Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's also been part of the reason for our success. We have an environmental consulting group and dealing with that issue, how are you going to deal with the whatever product you produce as waste from the operation. It's sort of become the tail that wags the dog. You can't deal with it after you've developed the flow sheet because a big part of the flow sheet development is the tailings you're going to produce. So it can influence the front end of the process and being able to provide the testing and the facilities to look at that at the same time as you're developing the flow sheet is really important and we do have that capability. So it's a challenge. I think the biggest challenge is it's a moving target and mining companies are finding it. I think certainly Canadian mining companies and most of the other Western real mining companies go with the highest current standard. They've become very socially and environmentally responsible. But that standard is moving and technology is not moving sometimes fast enough to meet standards that I think the other problem is there's not always really good rationale that goes into whatever whoever sets that standard. It's sometimes it's not set based on really good science. It's set on public perception, emotion and it can kill a project and kill it for all the wrong reasons. So you are a researcher, you are a manager, you run your own company. What would be your advice to young metallurgy students today? What I've said to a lot of young people who've joined our organization is learn a little bit about everything, choose something you love and learn a lot about that. So become really good at something, especially if it's something. But if you want to be valuable and if you want to have good job security, learn a little bit about everything in your field. So you can work in different areas and you can make intelligent comments of different areas. But if you want to be famous, become very good at something. Pick something you love and learn everything you can about it. And what's really important for me is being open to learning from others. Share your knowledge, don't hold it against your chest and don't be ashamed or scared to make a fool of yourself by making silly statements because you learn through them. So always be available to share your knowledge and to learn from others. And working in the gold area has been fantastic because as I said, it's a highly collegiate or collaborative industry, unlike some. What are you proudest of in your life? Now what? What are you proudest of in your life? I think being able to transition from a researcher to a manager of a business and to learn all that side, the responsibilities of good financial management of looking after people. At one stage I was responsible for nearly a thousand people. I always had an open door so people could come and cry on my shoulder. That was a transition that came quite easily to me. It doesn't come to everyone in the technical world. So I think being able to cover those two bases, I can't say I'm proud of it. I mean, that's just me. That's what I am. Thank you very much. You're welcome.