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Gold/Mining/Energy : KSWJ - KSW Industries, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgarylady who wrote (187)	8/29/2006 11:25:20 AM
From: Natedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 283

I thought it was a good read and proof that smelters will go the way of the doo doo bird! : ) thestar.com To the scrapyard with smelters Aug. 28, 2006. 06:37 AM LISA WRIGHT BUSINESS REPORTER Richmond, B.C. — In an industrial park about a 40-minute-drive from the head offices of Teck Cominco Ltd., dozens of engineers and chemists are watching steam rise from big kettles that may soon heat up the future of the base metal mining business. It's a real pressure cooker in more ways than one here at the Vancouver zinc miner's research division known as CESL, Cominco Engineering Services Ltd., where they're racing to be one of the first senior miners out of the gate with a liquid chemical process aimed at replacing traditional nickel and copper smelting. Teck's hostile takeover bid for Inco Ltd. didn't pan out but if CESL — pronounced `cesil' — turns out to be a success it would certainly be sweet for the veteran B.C. firm given the current red-hot metals landscape. Teck might yet get its hands on Inco's coveted ore bodies, at least for processing, if the Canadian mining icon ends up in the hands of its Brazilian business partner CVRD. Nickel reached a 19-year high last week as mining companies struggle to expand capacity to meet demand from stainless steelmakers in China for the metal used for rust-proofing. Copper has also traded at about $3.50 per pound for the last two months — more than double the price it was a year ago — which has driven up the market value of most producers and sparked a merger frenzy among the majors . So the pressure is truly on — from the steam-heated autoclave vessels here on up — to find ways to cut costs, energy and emissions at mining operations around the world. "What we get from our customers is a big bag of dirt. We just try to process it and refine it," engineer Robert Bruce says of the 10 tonnes of concentrate they treat daily at the plant in autoclaves that resemble big barrels tipped over on their sides. Hydrometallurgy, or hydromet as it's called in the business, is essentially chemicals, steam and pressure versus the old-school method of smelting or pyrometallurgy, which involves the use of intense heat to basically blast the coveted base metals from the ore. Hydromet is touted as cheaper to build, more efficient and far friendlier to the environment than the smokestacks that have become synonymous with smelters. But the technology is tricky, with a few notable flops among the juniors in the 1990s at some mines in Western Australia. So big miners like Teck, Inco and Phelps Dodge Corp. have taken their time in the hopes of getting their own separate versions of hydromet refining down pat over the next few years. "True to form it's the seniors that are taking the next big step in this technology," says base metals analyst Ray Goldie of Salman Partners, noting the junior miners got ahead of themselves in the failed Australian experience. The key difference this time around is that they're tackling a different ore: sulphide, which can be found in hard-rock mining operations such as Sudbury and Voisey's Bay, as opposed to the red soil laterite most frequently found in tropical climates and in Australia. "Nickel oxides or laterites are notoriously difficult to process. We're dealing with totally different feed material," says Doug Magoon, Teck Cominco's general manager of technology and president of the CESL division. "What we're doing now is like opening a peanut versus a walnut in terms of the intensity needed to extract the metal," he says of sulphide versus laterite processing. Although the masterminds at Teck have been tinkering with hydromet technology since 1992, the biggest test to date for CESL will be a year from now when its first commercial-scale plant will be up and running to treat copper concentrate from mining giant Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, or CVRD's, Sossego mine in Brazil. The $58 million (U.S.) plant now under construction in the Carajás region is slated to annually produce 10,000 tonnes of copper cathode over a two-year test period that the industry will be watching closely to see if it can be proven to work at a big operating mine. "It's an incremental step to a commercial scale testing facility, which is very important because it will demonstrate the efficiency of this process on a larger scale," says Magoon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- `What we're doing now is like opening a peanut versus a walnut in terms of the intensity needed to extract the metal' Doug Magoon, Teck Cominco's general manager of technology -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CVRD then plans to expand on it by building a 235,000-tonne a year hydrometallurgical plant for two new mines. Pheonix-based Phelps Dodge already has a large commercial scale plant at its Morenci operations in Arizona involving a "mine-for-leach" process that uses bacteria to extract copper from the ore and solvent extraction to recover copper from the resulting leach liquor. And Toronto's LionOre Mining International Ltd. has just given the green light to build a $620 million (U.S.) commercial plant at its Tati mine in Botswana using its patented Activox hydromet system. Inco meanwhile is trying out its own process at a demonstration hydromet plant in Argentia, Newfoundland for Voisey's Bay that is roughly the same size as Teck's 500-tonne per year plant here in Richmond. The Toronto miner is also planning to prove the critics wrong about laterites by building a hydromet plant to treat the rusty red soil at its Goro mine project in the South Pacific island of New Caledonia. As Inco's suitor, Teck had hoped to use the CESL process at the nickel producer's sulphide ore mines, particularly the brand new Voisey's Bay site and the 50-year-old Thompson, Man. operations. Although its dream of creating an all-Canadian mining powerhouse died this month when its bid for Inco expired, there's still hope that it will happen through Teck's connection to CVRD. The Brazilian miner is now in the lead for a potential takeover of Inco with an all-cash bid, and if everything works out at the mine in the Amazon it would seem logical that CVRD would then go on to use it at Inco projects if the South American miner's bid wins the day, says Teck spokesman Doug Horswill. Teck Cominco chief executive Don Lindsay says Teck's CESL process would be a better fit at Voisey's Bay than the hydromet technique Inco is now testing in Newfoundland. He also argues that it would be much more friendly to the environment than what's currently used at Inco's Thompson operations too. "CESL has processed Voisey's Bay ore from way back before Inco was even involved," says Lindsay, referring to the mid-1990s when the Vancouver miner was in the running for the famed deposit that eventually ended up with Inco. The beauty of the CESL method is that it's effective in treating bulk concentrate such as the mixture of nickel and copper at Voisey's Bay. It can also remove impurities such as arsenic and fluoride and can be used on low-grade ore — all of which would normally make a mine uneconomic using conventional smelting but not so with Teck's technology. A Voisey's Bay relationship would mean that nickel and copper metal could be produced in Newfoundland and Labrador rather than having to export concentrate, producing savings on metal processing and making sense logistically while also resolving provincial demands for value to be added locally, says Magoon. Teck has been using a similar high-pressure, high-temperature process at its zinc operations in Trail, B.C. since 1981, he notes, adding the company hopes to soon apply CESL to its Highland Valley copper mine in B.C. Goldie says mining companies weigh the financial and environmental benefits of the new technology equally. "When they make presentations to investors they talk about costs. When they make presentations to people in communities surrounding the mine, they talk about the environment, so they're both very important," says Goldie. Inco's chief executive Scott Hand says despite failures of laterite projects in Australia, he has confidence in his company's acid-pressure leach and solvent extraction technology process developed for Goro since it has gone through extensive pilot plant testing both in Canada and New Caledonia. "There was a lot learned in the Australian experience. The process works but the problem was how it was implemented," he says. Goldie calls 2009 to 2012 "the judgement day" for this next generation of projects since that's when most are slated to come on stream. "If it doesn't work they know they always have the old technology (smelting) to fall back on," says Goldie.

To: calgarylady who wrote (187)	9/6/2006 7:21:18 AM
From: calgarylady	Respond to of 283

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