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Strategies & Market Trends : Ride the Tiger with CD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Canuck Dave who wrote (139107)	12/13/2008 12:25:21 PM
From: Goose94	Respond to of 312830

40% growth maybe, if that...?! Yes where astronauts trained.

To: Canuck Dave who wrote (139107)	12/13/2008 1:23:44 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 312830

The sulfur burn is as a bad in the Algoma hills near the Sault. One of the reason there are no trees or few, is the land is very rocky. You can see that from the air. It isn't all from open pit roasting of ores in the 19th century. They cut trees, heaped the sulfides in pits and lit fires. Takes an inordinate time to roast the stuff. One good thing about that method is the pollution falls not far from the tree. It is all local. Clamp down on sulfur emissions in Canada started in the 1950's. By 1963 Inco was forced to build the super stack to get the stuff into air a mile or more. By the late 1950's the first catalytic patents were made for SO2 from smelter flues. Nobody bought them as they were thought expensive. 1 dollar per ton of sulfate emission. Inco hired Walter Curlook instead to develop their own in house reduction system that took them 20 years and 100 million to perfect. It gets to 90% reduction by making sulfuric acid. Nothing ground breaking about that as a few people were already doing that way back when. It made money. H2S04 can be sold. At the time the gas companies had a lock on the sulfuric market from sour wells and kept prices low. Now it is a much better idea. But if you look at it from the standpoint of getting the gold out and getting permits, it is cheap and pays. Roasting is exothermic, i.e. needs no energy input, produces heat or power and a three high value products. gold or copper, heat energy and H2S04. Kerr Addison's roaster provided 15% of the gold, and 800 horsepower of heat energy. It was an early co gen plant in fact. Barrick went to autoclave at Poste Betze to bypass the whole arsenic and SO2 emission question that had been basically shut down by US environmental legislation way back in the 1920's believe it or not. Before that a single company doing roasting did most of the custom milling of the highly refractory SW US ores. Roasting is really the ticket as it can be abated fume wise about 99.7%. Xstrata has a new process for atmospheric reduction of pyrite by extremely fine grinding and sulfuric acid. It does not passivate and oxidizes the sulfide completely. It is called the Albion process. Bateman has a new process too, I believe they use very high pressure and temperature and oxytgen. 600 PSI and 225 C. Also very benign products are formed. Another is to use NaOh in a novel process in an autoclave. I favour a technique called no off gas roasting where stoichiometric amounts of limestone are added with a calatyst to the flue stream. This way you avoid gypsum formation which can foul circuits. Direct mixing of lime with the roasting product forms gypsum. Then you need scouring by magnesium, sonic cleaning of pipes and some diabolical methods of keeping filter cloths clean that won't make Jesus start crying all over again. Hold the green, please. maps.google.ca