Jim Cribbes is a highly experienced engineer, project manager and company director.
Jim has over 45 years of experience in the iron processing industry, much of it spent with the Pittsburgh, USA office of Aker Solutions, (previously known as Kvaerner, Dravo and Davy McKee), in the development of major iron and steel projects around the world.
He has been involved with operating and developing iron pelletising plants in a number of countries including Quebec Cartier Mining in Canada, Hibbing Taconite in the US, Jindal Vijayanagar Steel in India and Robe River Mining here in Australia. He was also Kvaerner’s Project Director for the HYL direct reduction project of Grasim Industries in India.
Jim was part of GHD’s management team in Western Australia from 2013 to 2020 after they purchased ProMet Engineers, where he was previously the Chairman and Managing Director for 13 years. Under Jim’s leadership, ProMet Engineers established itself as the lead process engineering consulting company for iron ore within Australia and grew from its early foundations to a A$35Mpa turnover. ProMet was instrumental in the design and development of several magnetite projects in Australia, including Project Magnet in Whyalla, South Australia and the Karara Iron Ore Project in WA’s Mid-West region.
Between 1996 and 2000 Jim was the Associate Director for Kvaerner in Western Australia and was involved with all of the metallurgical projects completed during that period. This included studies into AUSI Iron in the Pilbara and Mt Gibson Iron near Geraldton. He was Kvaerner’s project sponsor on the Cawse Nickel project, the most successful of the three lateritic nickel projects in Western Australia and was actively involved with the development of the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project under BHP’s ownership.
He holds a degree of B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy