Sustainable Minerals Conference '22

Greetings Network!

I am looking forward to presenting at the Sustainable Minerals conference next week.

The abstract of the presentation entitled "Exploring the economic potential of an electrochemical alternative to managing acid mine tailings" is found here.

Depending on who is read, acid mine drainage is either the second biggest challenge after climate change (Tuffnel, 2017, Acid drainage: the global environmental crisis you’ve never heard of) or just “…an environmental problem of global scale” (Moncur, 2006, Acid mine drainage: past, present... …future?) for the mining industry. In either case, it is a characteristic of massive sulphide mining activities.

Today, potentially acid generating tailings are concentrated, and the risk of oxidation is reduced by either covering them with water or with a capillary barrier. Any effluent seeping through over the coming few hundred years is treated using a number of different methods.

In this presentation, we will venture to explore the economic potential of an electrochemical technology alternative that can both neutralise acid tailings effluent as well as contribute to concentrating the remaining heavy metal salts. This will be accomplished by conceptualizing the electrochemical process, defining a stochiometric model around it and tying the results to current commodity prices. The presentation will close with a discussion of the limitations of the model as well as possible impact on future mineral process operations.