 | In July 2008, we visited Cobalt, Ontario, to learn about the mining industry's legacy in this once-productive mining camp.
What we saw and learned have potentially opened the door to a new application of bioleaching, that being the environmental remediation of polluted tailings and the subsequent recovery of metal for our own account.
In 1903, silver was discovered in Cobalt and that set off a mining rush similar to the Klondike gold fields. Between 1903 and 1922, over 300 million ounces of silver were produced from 100 mines. Keep in mind, that a mine can be anything from a project with a 1,000 foot shaft, to a hole in the ground made by a lone miner following a silver-rich vein underground.
In any event, the grades of some of the veins in this camp reached 1,000 ounces per ton, meaning that a significant amount of silver was left behind if it was deemed to be too difficult to recover. In addition, there were very few applications or uses for cobalt metal in those times, and so it was thrown out with the silver tails. Recently, cobalt metal traded as high as $50 per pound compared to historic prices closer to $3 per pound. All of this means that there is considerable value entombed in the tailings of this mining camp and the hard work of blasting and lifting rock to surface has been paid for by someone else.
But there is also a big problem associated with the Cobalt tailings... arsenic.
To begin with, the background levels of arsenic that occur naturally in the rock of Cobalt are very high. With the crushing of rock in search of silver, the arsenic has become mobile, and today has leached into the local lakes and streams to such a point that there are very high levels of arsenic in the local water.
One of the attributes of bioleaching is its ability to liberate arsenic from its sulphide host. This, in turn, allows us to "marry" the arsenic with iron to produce a benign and stable ferric arsenate product that has been approved for conventional disposal by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
So, we have identified a long-standing environmental problem which we hope to correct or mitigate, while also producing a profit from the production of silver, cobalt and nickel.
We were introduced to this opportunity by a company called Gold Bullion Development Corp. (TSX.V: GBB) that had recently purchased a high grade tailings deposit near Cobalt in Gowganda. We subsequently entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Gold Bullion (see news release dated September 2, 2008) and, at our request, they recently shipped a 500 kg sample of tailings from their Castle Mine property to SGS Lakefield, so we can determine if the tailings can be treated for arsenic neutralization and metal recovery. We expect to have an answer to these questions by year end 2008.
Backgrounder - Arsenic Tailings Demonstration Plant Project, Cobalt, Ontario
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