Author:
Drobe Malte,Haubrich Frank,Gajardo Mariano,Marbler Herwig
Abstract
To increase resource efficiency, mining residues–especially tailings–have come into the focus of research, companies, and politics. Tailings still contain varying amounts of unextracted elements of value and minerals that were not of economic interest during production. As for primary mineral deposits, only a small share of tailings offers the possibility for an economic reprocessing. To minimize exploration expenditure, a stepwise process is followed during exploration, to estimate the likelihood of a project to become a mine or in this case a reprocessing facility. During this process, costs are continuously estimated at least in an order of magnitude. Reprocessing flowsheets for copper mine tailings in Chile were developed and costs and revenues of possible products from reprocessing were examined for a rough economic assessment. Standard cost models with capex and opex for flotation, leaching, and magnetic separation were adopted to the needs of tailings reprocessing. A copper tailing (around 2 M t) that also contains magnetite was chosen as a case study. A combination of magnetic separation and leaching gave the best economic results for copper and magnetite. The adopted cost models showed positive results at this early stage of investigation (semi-technical scale processing tests).
Subject
General Materials Science,Metals and Alloys
Reference36 articles.
1. Vorkommen und Produktion Mineralischer Rohstoffe—Ein Ländervergleichhttps://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Min_rohstoffe/Downloads/studie_Laendervergleich_2017.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=7
2. Mine Wastes: Characterization, Treatment, and Environmental Impacts;Lottermoser,2010
3. Anuario de la Minería de Chile 2019https://www.sernageomin.cl/pdf/anuario_2019_act100720.pdf
4. Historical assessment of metal recovery potential from old mine tailings: A study case for porphyry copper tailings, Chile
5. A multidisciplinary approach considering geochemical reorganization and internal structure of tailings impoundments for metal exploration
Cited by
17 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献