The Perth office of science and engineering firm SRK Consulting has continued its expansion with three new consultant appointments, one with a view to creating a new division.
Two additional consultants are expected by the new year, when the company’s property lease expires.
Apart from looking for new premises to accommodate the restructuring and growth, and to better facilitate client liaison work, managing director Peter Williams is busy progressing the group on three fronts.
Dr Williams said the formation of the new mining geotechnical services division, to be headed by new appointee, principal geotechnical engineer Allan Haines, would bring together expertise the office already had, to establish a specialist group within the mining group.
The geotechnical engineering group, now totalling three, could be as large as six by next year.
Resources, geological and mining services activity out of SRK’s Perth office exemplifies the influence of the international firm, with Dr Williams and other consultants leaving Perth’s Spring to do business in Mongolia, Bulgaria, China, Brazil, Argentina and Finland.
The office was advancing its presence in China, in alliance with the China Mining Association in Beijing.
Dr Williams said the company had been doing due diligence work in China, and had a number of options to develop that work.
SRK had made a lot of contacts since developing its China alliance a year ago, and was now looking at several opportunities for collaborative technical programs, Dr Williams said.
SRK Perth has been looking at new processing techniques for GIS data capture and is preparing for a new year release of a new 3-D geological modelling package developed in-house.
"This is a completely new way of doing it," Dr Williams said.
The outlook for WA’s mining sector was quite buoyant, with a lot of new projects coming onstream, Dr Williams said.
