WATER MANAGEMENT
A CLEAN-IX elution plant for Heathgate Resources in South Australia
contaminants, rapidly dewater tailings and recover valuable metals.
An example of the more selective approach to water treatment is the DESALX ® plant Clean TeQ Water is delivering for Nyrstar at Balen, in Belgium. The plant is designed to selectively remove sulphate and selenium using a membrane-free, two-stage Moving Bed Ion Exchange( MBIX) process integrated with lime precipitation as part
of a broader zero liquid discharge strategy.
These high-sulphate, variable waters are often where conventional reverse osmosis systems begin to struggle, with scaling and fouling often leading to very low water recovery, according to the company.
Clean TeQ Water says the same flowsheet at an Australian gold mine reduced sulphate from 1,515 to 700 mg / L, calcium from 300 to 85 mg / L and iron from 5 to 0.1 mg / L at 90 % water recovery, with treated water suitable for aquifer injection under the State EPP.
Tailings storage and management remains one of the biggest water challenges at many mine sites, with Clean TeQ Water’ s ATA ® dewatering technology looking to overcome some of the perceived industry issues.
ATA is now progressing into its first fullscale front-end engineering design study in Australia, following pilot work with Harmony Gold in South Africa.
Across test work and piloting on a range of commodities, ATA has demonstrated rapid dewatering, achieving solids concentrations of up to 62 % after one minute of gravity dewatering on a # 70 mesh screen, together with an order of magnitude improvement in permeability over flocculated tailings and return water turbidity typically below 50 NTU, according to the company.
For operators weighing dry stacking, constrained tailings storage facility capacity, production bottlenecks or high water losses to tailings, the potential to use ATA with vacuum belt filtration rather than conventional thickening and high-pressure filtration may be significant, with typical cost savings of around 35 %.
Clean TeQ Water’ s circa-A $ 19.2 million($ 13.5 million) contract with Rio Tinto at Rincon in Argentina applies standalone MBIX, branded CLEAN-IX ®, to soften lithium concentrate, with the aim of reducing lithium losses, waste volumes and freshwater demand in refining.
The same standalone MBIX capability has also now been demonstrated in uranium recovery for Heathgate Resources in South Australia, where the CLEAN-IX U-Column plant recently passed performance testing with all criteria met or exceeded, including improved eluate grades, reduced water use and stronger operating efficiency.
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Contact Phil Playle( phil @ im-mining. com)