Dig Deep

A handful of useful technical points emerge - the 3x land requirement for wet disposal vs. dry stacking, the Casagrande liquefaction test applied to filter cake, and coarse flotation cutting milling energy to 20% - but they are buried under extended career biography, generic net-zero platitudes, and repetitive company history. Insight-per-minute is low.

“the land, the ground that you need to build a wet disposal. Is about three times bigger than what you need for A filter, tailing, stack”

“coarse flotation means that you reduce the milling um energy and you already separate um tailings and concentrates uh at a coarse basis. So you discard tailings without putting uh, by putting only 20% of the energy into it”

The lifecycle-cost reframe for tailings decisions (including land, rehabilitation, and water costs) is a legitimately underused lens in the industry and is the episode's freshest argument; everything else - net zero importance, population growth concerns, recycling will grow - is well-worn territory with no contrarian edge.

“when a decision is made about uh, filtering the tailings and doing stacking versus um, having wet disposal, I think we should talk more about life cycle cost”

“include the property cost, include the um, rehabilitation cost and everything. And also the treatment of all your uh, water”

Hahn is a credible, decades-long practitioner who has done actual lab work, retrofits, and product development across named real-world sites; he is a vendor-side engineer rather than an operator, which limits the seat-of-authority, but he has genuine technical depth and is not a recycled thought-leader.

“we did the first two of these high performance disk filters for the Oginis Alumina refinery. And that was in 1997”

“we got uh, orders for Aluminary Nalco, for Wagerup and also for uh Worsley in Australia”

The episode contains meaningful specifics - named projects, dates, percentage moisture improvements, land-area multiples, and energy-reduction figures for coarse flotation - though many claims lack supporting data sources and the career-history section substitutes anecdote for evidence.

“getting typically somewhere between 2 and 5% less moisture compared to standard design disk filters”

“we got then involved in base metals and all that. But we identified that vacuum filtration is not good for concentrates”

The host works through an obvious pre-prepared list (career path, company overview, why invest, where is the industry in 10-20 years, final message) with no follow-up probing, no pushback on vendor claims, and no genuine curiosity shown; the interview functions as a PR platform rather than an intellectual exchange.

“Do you think net zero emissions is important for mining? And also what about recycling? Is there an alternative, uh, to the whole mining industry?”

“Obviously you're a specialist in this area. Where do you see the industry in the sort of next 10 to 20 or even further out than that?”