Here it is-- president Boulay's comments on Ateba Mines' "deflocculant" method (& its appl. in AB):
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Thanks for your question re: the Ateba Mines [ABM] deflocculant mentioned on the Birch Mountain thread. I believe Tintina and Crowflight have used it with some success on samples taken from northeastern Alberta where they are looking for gold and precious metals in Devonian carbonates and lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks. As I mentioned to you in another email, we also have tested the Ateba deflocculant on one low priority stream sample with good preliminary separation results (but no diamonds were recovered). This is in response to your question on how the process works and is based on my meeting with the Ateba people in Toronto, watching their 5 minute videotape and trying out part of a small sample of their product. I intend to perform more tests since their product works very well.
The western basin marine sedimentary rocks, and Alberta kimberlite pipes for that matter, are full of swelling clays, commonly although not always correctly called "bentonites". These clays swell to many times their volume when they get wet and produce the famous "gumbo" of the western Canadian and U.S. plains. Very messy stuff. If you are sampling this material in order to eventually perform a mechanical separation of the contained solids (pebbles, mineral grains, gold grains, diamond and diamond indicators, etc...) then you have to find an efficient way of "killing" the clays. Usually this means liquifying them and then screening the solids which can then be subjected to examination or concentration. There are a number of products available to us "clay killers". The Ateba product seems, IMO based on very limited experience, to be much more effective than other products I have used. I suspect it may be so effective that it will allow me do decant the liquified clays from the solids rather than screen the solids from the liquified clays. If so it would greatly simplify sample processing. I need to do more testing.
There is not much mystique involved in this apparently good product. It takes care of an essential and burdensome clay removal job. That's all it does. By the way, in a commercial context, the liquified clays can be easily "re-set" to a gel by throwing in some lime. Eventually the waste will "cure" and become cement.
Feel free to post this to the Marum thread if you want to.
Regards, Rick Boulay
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Thanks again Rick!
Interesting-- this should open up new doors in terms of discovering/ assessing deposit economics...
Cheers,
-j
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