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Bioleaching plant proposed for Cobalt area
BacTech has over 20 years of experience in the field of bacterial oxidation or "bioleaching". The Company has successfully designed, engineered, licensed and built bioleach plants for clients in the gold industry. However, no such plants exist in the base metal industry. BacTech is now poised to transfer its technology to environmental remediation applications that offer favourable economics through metal recovery.
In the Cobalt area, BacTech intends to build and operate a demonstration plant capable of treating 200,000 tonnes per annum ("tpa") of mine tailings. The plant will effectively remove a source of arsenic pollution (93%) in the region, along with recovering cobalt, silver, and nickel for sale to market. Successful operation of the demonstration plant will lead to the construction of a plant capable of treating 1,000,000 tpa over 15 years or more.
Clean air, soil and water benefits
There will be numerous clean air, soil, and water benefits to the environment with the operation of a demonstration and full scale tailings processing plant. Each tonne of tails contains 0.15% sulphur and the process will capture 85% of the sulphur produced. Therefore, the quantity of sulphur captured equals 1.28 kg of sulphur per tonne of tails. The equivalent amount of sulphur dioxide is then 2.55 kg per tonne of tails or 0.0025 tonnes sulphur dioxide per tonne of tails. At 200,000 tpa, the demo plant will save 509 kg sulphur dioxide emissions per year. A 1 million tpa commercial plant saves 2,547 kg of sulphur dioxide per year.
Other clean air benefits are as follows. The Cobalt tails contain quantities of arsenic at 0.42% and trace quantities of mercury at 4 grams per tonne. Such pollutants are common for many types of tailings materials. These elements would normally report to flue gases in smelting, which for a 1 million tpa operation equates to 4,200 tpa of arsenic (equivalent to 11,089 tpa of arsenic triooxide in flue gas) and 4 tpa of mercury, if normal smelting processes were used.
If BacTech's technology were not used for treatment of the concentrate, traditional methods (i.e., roasting and smelting) would release noxious SO2 and As2O3 emissions into the atmosphere. For soil and water benefits (assuming a 1,000,000 tpa plant), each tonne of tails contains 0.42% arsenic, 0.13% cobalt, 0.06% nickel. An acceptable recovery of 85% arsenic and 80% for the other metals would equate to 3.6 million kg per year arsenic, 1.1 million kg per year cobalt, and 0.5 million kg per year nickel that will no longer be in the soils and be leached into the local watershed.
Additional information
Fact sheet on the proposed bioleach plant
Presentation by Dr. Paul Miller, BacTech's Vice President of Technology & Engineering, to the Alta 2009 Nickel-Cobalt, Copper and Uranium Conference held May 25-30, 2009 in Perth, Australia
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