Biomining

A Separation Problem: Our access to easily extractable copper is gradually diminishing as demands for copper continues to grow worldwide. To meet these demands, non-traditional, metallurgically challenging deposits are expected to become more prevalent, thereby forcing us to deal with more complex, and lower-grade ores containing higher levels of impurities. Arsenic-challenged deposits is a concern for the copper mining industry as arsenic produces hazardous fumes and oxide dusts during the smelting process. Smelting with arsenic therefore poses a significant risk to the health of the workers and to the environment. Furthermore, safe removal and disposal of stabilized arsenic is often difficult and costly. With stricter legislation in place, the mining industry is facing increasing pressure to progressively reduce the amount of allowable arsenic concentrations for smelters. Consequently, fines and penalties are set for arsenic concentrations exceeding 0.2%, while ores past 0.5% arsenic concentrations are rejected by smelters. Therefore, there is increasing precedence for removing arsenic-containing minerals such as enargite (Cu3AsS4)from relevant minerals, such as chalcopyrite (CuFeS2), during the flotation process. However, separation is often conflicted with shared flotation properties between enargite and the associated valuable minerals. The mining industry has developed several methods for dealing with arsenic impurities, which includes precipitation with scorodite and pressure hydrometallurgical procedures (150C and 1380kPa) for processing high concentration of arsenic while extracting copper in parallel. However, many procedures requires an enormous amount of energy or additional acidic chemicals to help selectively separate arensic-containing minerals in the ore mixtures.

Our solution: We, the UBC iGEM team, feel that separation can be done other ways that does not have to

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