Meet the Team
Matthew Huggan
B App Sc, MBA, M Min Econ, MAIPM, FAICD, MAusIMM, CPPE
Managing Director
Matthew is a highly experienced mining, processing and financial professional with more than 30 years experience in exploration, mining and processing. He has developed several projects from greenfield to operation.
He has extensive experience in metallurgical processes and has developed a number of processes, which have changed project economics. Matthew has constructed numerous laboratory and pilot plants and a number of full scale processing plants.
Matthew has extensive finance, merger and acquisition and economics expertise. He uses this expertise in conjunction with his technical and project management skills to build value.
Peter Kelliher
B Sc (Hons), Grad Dip Mineral Economics MAusIMM
Consultant
Peter has almost 50 years of mining and metallurgical experience. He has worked on hundreds of processing plants in numerous commodities and industry. He has developed numerous flowsheets and scaled them up from the laboratory to production. This experience includes the construction, commissioning and operation of these plants.
Peter has operated long term and short term processing plants and held the position of Mine Manager on numerous projects.
Peter has also been heavily involved in due diligence and mergers and acquisitions for projects and processing plants.
Our Story
Clean Mines brings together decades of experience in mining, environment, finance and metallurgy.
Our metallurgy journey started in the mid-1990s. We had exploration licences with significant metal content, but limited finance and a poor public market. After obtaining a Mining Lease we brought in metallurgists, designers, engineers and fabricators to build a small mining plant. Testwork said we would get 98% gold recovery and a saleable base metal concentrate. But when the plant was constructed, it achieved only 3% and market conditions meant the concentrate was unsaleable. With a contained metal value of over $2,000 (14g/t Au equivalent) per tonne of ore at the time, we decided to explore other methods of extracting the value.
We set up a high tech lab and tested and developed numerous industrial and mineral processes to obtain value from the ore. Over the next decade we explored many dead ends but were eventually able to produce a 67% zinc concentrate, dore bullion and copper metal.
Then we expanded to difficult waste streams such as historical slags and tailings, end of life lithium ion batteries, end of life solar panels, and critical minerals.
Our blend of industrial chemistry and metallurgy gives us unique insights into processing and creating value.
