Cleaning up mining
Local firm in race to eliminate tailings waste
INTERNATIONAL mining giants are paying close attention to a concept to eliminate mine tailings waste being developed by an international consortium involving a Geelong engineering management consultancy.
The Circular Mine Consortium was announced last week in the top 10 of 153 submissions from 19 countries to the global BHP Tailings Challenge.
The BHP initiative is trying to find sustainable, cutting-edge solutions to repurpose copper tailings into a marketable product with solutions potentially addressing the huge risks and environmental issues posed by tailings dams around the world.
There are more than 3500 active tailings dams worldwide, generating billions of tonnes of waste a year, and with at least one tailings dam failure a year resulting in a human or environmental disaster.
The Circular Mine Consortium will get US$50,000 to help prove its concept before the top three proposals are selected later this year to go to the final stage and ultimate prize of a US$8.6m grant.
Geelong company MEKS Solutions is one of six companies involved in the consortium, which combines specialist knowledge from European recycling and Australian mining industries. Key elements of their proposal include a bioleaching process to extract valuable minerals from the waste, a carbonation process central to repurposing waste into reusable materials and soil rehabilitation solutions to help mine sites with revegetation and local agricultural industry.
MEKS Solutions director Michael Ingwersen said the bid was designed to achieve near-zero mine tailings waste and neutralise contamination, potentially eliminating the need for mining companies to maintain toxic tailings dams for the rest of their life, even after mine closure.
“If we can recycle or eliminate the tailings altogether, it reduces or removes that liability from the mining companies’ balance sheet,” Mr Ingwersen said.
The consortium says it has identified potential revenue streams and markets from processing and repurposing tailings, the minerals and metals extracted, construction products, the carbon economy, water recovery and topsoil supply.
These incomes have the potential to neutralise the cost of recycling the tailings, removing the need for dams.
Part of initial discussions about taking part in the BHP Tailings Challenge, MEKS Solutions’ role has been designing the waste flowsheet that knits the solutions together.
“We started finding all those businesses and saw that there was a flow sheet that we could put together with various solutions that could hopefully reprocess as much of the tailings as possible,” Mr Ingwersen said.
Developing the solution, which involves its own IP, has captured the attention of the world’s largest mining companies. MEKS Solutions was a busy virtual exhibitor at last year’s International Mining and Resource Conference.
“We had 23 meetings with different mining companies from around the world,” Mr Ingwersen said. “It was a fantastic event for us and really showed the interest in the mining community to look at sustainable solutions.
“We are now working on how we market that even further and take some of the leads that we have and turn that into a sustainable reality for them.”
He said he was encouraged that Victoria could become home to global experts in repurposing mine tailings.
“Part of what we would like to see is that we can actually grow a business and create that expertise in Victoria for a new global business,” he said.
The Circular Mine Consortium involves French geoscience organisation BRGM, Belgian international research centre VITO, Brisbane business management consultant Adivero, Queensland’s largest soil recycling business Soil Cyclers, and Melbourne mining ECP contracting company Mincore.