Awards

Derek Kerfoot was born and educated in England, receiving his D.Phil. in Inorganic Chemistry from The University of Oxford in 1967. After two years working on the early development of carbon and graphite fibre with Courtaulds Ltd in the UK, he moved to Canada to work for Inco Ltd in Copper Cliff, Ontario. Over the next thirty five years he remained in the Extractive Metallurgy R & D field, working variously for Noranda Research, Seltrust Engineering, Sherritt Gordon and Inco Technical Services, from which he took early retirement in 2005. He is a specialist in the design and development of hydrometallurgical processes for the extraction and refining of base metals, particularly nickel, copper and cobalt, from sulphide ores and concentrates. During eighteen years with Sherritt in Fort Saskatchewan he focused on the development of acid pressure leaching process flowsheets for the recovery and refining of nickel and copper from PGM-containing nickel-copper mattes. This technology was successfully licensed by Sherritt to all the major South African platinum producers. He subsequently made a significant contribution to the continuing success of the Sherritt Refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, with the development of a novel hydrometallurgical process for separating cobalt from nickel, which facilitated the conversion of the Refinery to treat mixed nickel-cobalt sulphides from Cuba. After moving to Inco Technical Services in Ontario in 1997, he led the development of a novel hydrometallurgical process for the direct treatment of nickel sulphide concentrates from the Voisey's Bay orebody in Labrador. This process has been successfully tested at pilot plant scale and is in the design phase for a commercial plant to be built in Newfoundland. Derek Kerfoot received the Airey Award of the CIM in 1997. He holds numerous patents and his publications include a major article on the Extractive Metallurgy of Nickel in Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. More recently, he was invited to deliver the 2008 Mackiw Lecture in Metallurgy at the University of Alberta.