NORTH SHORE HI 29 - Sunday, March 11, 1990 - North Shore News mee H TECH Bacteria turns concentrate into gold WORTH VAN COMPANY MARKETING BIO-LEACH PLANTS COMMERCIALLY A NORTH Vancouver research and engineering company puts microscopic plants to work to turn gold-bearing con- centrate into a precious primary product, gold, and a sal- able byproduct, sulphur. The process is called bio- leaching and the bacteria deployed are thiobacillus ferrooxidans. Coastech Research Inc. recently shipped a prototype plant for North America’s first full-scale commercial bio-leach plant to a gold mine operated by Dickenson \N a& high tech Michael Becker Mines Ltd. in northern Ontario. The $350,000 small-scale plant will process approximately one to two tonnes of concentrate daily. If the test operation works out, a full- size, $2.5 million bio-leach plant will be built to process 35 tonnes of concentrate daily. The biochemistry at the heart of the process is not new. Quite sim- ply, the bacteria chew up sulphides. The copper-mining in- dustry uses thiobacillus ferroox- idans to oxidize sulphides. The process creates acid and the acid leaches copper. But said Coastech president Brad Marchant, ‘‘We’ve adapted those bacteria to much more nasty sulphide minerals, ones that have arsenic and antimony in them. We oxidize, or remove, those sulphides that contain gold and we extract the gold with conventional pro- cessing by cyanide solution.”’ The bio-leach refining process does away with roasting plants, which contribute to the acid rain problem. The bio-leach process produces 2n acid solution. But said Marchant, ‘‘We have bacteria that then convert that te an elemental sulphur which is sold. It’s a very clean process and much cheaper than the alternative.” Marchant counts nis company among the few world leaders in the field. Two companies active with full-scale commercial bio-leach plants already in operation, Mintek and Genmin, are located in Johannesburg, South Africa. Coastech helped establish the Mintek plant, which opened in June. While the Coastech team of engineers, technologists and technicians works on setting up similar bio-leach plants for other mining-industry clients, biochemical action of another order will be pressed into service closer to home. Coastech plans to use 2 number of its reactors (large tanks) to compost organic waste. The plan is to have a viable municipal waste treatment plant operational within six months. The reactors would heat organic garbage, material such as lawn clippings, vegetable waste and animal waste removed from the AYER ip=> NEWS photos Mike Wakefield COASTECH RESEARCH president Brad Marchant puts bacteria to work in the gold-mining business. The company recently shipped a prototype bio-leach plant to Ontario. North Shore waste stream, to 70° Where a standard compost heap might take four weeks to four months to reduce waste, the ther- mophilic process in the Coastech reactors would compost waste in a day or so. The end product, a fer- tilizer, would be sold. Coastech is teamed with North Shore-based International Biowaste Corp. to bring the project together. Coastech was founded in 1983 by Marchant and company vice- president Rick Lawrence. The company is primarily active in the mining industry and specializes in the chemical extraction of metals and waste treatment. Said Marchant, ‘*‘We do lab research and then scale that up in- to pilot projects, which are mini- plants.. We (also) do all the tests required for permitting mines.’’ Information at this level is pass- ed on to engineering firms, which build the final full-scale plants. 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