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THE CLEAR CHOICE: Each year, many tonnes of
impure water get dumped out
onto the face of the earth as
industrial waste. Mining is a significant
contributor to this waste
water being shed into nature
because of its many diverse uses
within the industry. Yet more
and more mining companies
are taking conscientious action
to minimise the impact their
operations have on the natural
environment, and are increasingly
seeking solutions to treat
and clean this water...
ABR Process Development was originally started to examine ways that electrochemistry and membrane technology could be used to create valuable products from sugar. Today, even though the company is working in a very different area, the approach is the same. The company retrieves chemicals from low value or waste products resulting from industrial use. The costs involved in cleaning the waste streams are often less than those of waste disposal and, as a bonus, generate commercially viable by-products.
“It turns out that we’ve developed quite a reasonable expertise in electrochemistry and particularly membrane applications,” explains Adam Blunn, CEO of ABR Process Development. “Perhaps, through not realising conventional limitations, we’ve actually ended up with some reasonable pieces of intellectual property and patents. It turns out that a really nice area of application is in recovery of acids and metals from industrial process or waste streams. That applies to metal finishing, the mining industry, hydrometallurgical processing, hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid and even phosphoric acid for the phosphate fertiliser industry.”
Through the use of chemistry, ABR Process Development is able to clean waste water and remove harmful chemicals in a way that no one has ever tried before. With advances in technology, the company is constantly looking at developing viable processes that may not have been possible in the past.
Initially, the company invented a process for manufacturing gluconic acid from sugar. When it began and the initial investments went into the project, it was a very niche market with few competitors. However, shortly thereafter more and more companies started manufacturing this acid and overheads became bigger until the company realised it was time to branch out into new directions.
The next step that ABR took was to continue conducting contract test work as well as seek new technology opportunities; one of the outcomes was the realisation that the company could recover and regenerate sulphuric acid from magnesium sulphate by using electrochemical membranes and depositing magnesium hydroxide at a low pH. “The conventional wisdom is that you can’t do that,” says Mr Blunn. “It’s quite remarkable; we’ve got a configuration in the system that’s quite well protected with patents.”
As far as sulphates and sulphuric acid are concerned, they have broad applications in hydrometallurgy and, to a lesser degree, in the metal finishing industry. The recovery of sulphates therefore is highly important in the remediation of serious acid drainage problems.
Hydrochloric acid has a much broader use than sulphuric acid in industry; essentially all metal finishing industries and major steel mills generate significant amounts of hydrochloric acid waste. The company took its knowledge of sulphuric acid recovery and applied it to hydrochloric acid, but it turned out that it didn’t work quite the same way. For this reason, after discovering that it was possible to recover sulphuric acid, a new process was developed to recover hydrochloric acid, remove the hazardous waste stream, and reduce the raw inputs by a potential ninety per cent.
According to Mr Blunn, “Our process, which is normally a waste treatment process, is actually a resource reuse process that, compared with existing processes, is cash flow positive with a payback in about four years or in some cases as little as two years.”
Another significant application of ABR’s hydrochloric acid recovery technology is in treating the brine waste resulting from the extraction of shale gas and coal seam gas. The traditional method of treating waters from these gas recovery processes would be to simply recover as much of it as possible then concentrate the brine, but ABR can actually process that waste brine and recover valuable by-products such as hydrochloric acid, caustic soda or magnesium and calcium hydroxide. A key side effect of recovering the brine from these operations is that, through ABR’s patented process, the company is also able to recover one hundred per cent of the water.
The core technology is based on electrochemical membrane separations. For example, sulphuric acid is recovered through an ion exchange membrane; for hydrochloric acid, electrohydrolysis is used to capture and regenerate the chemical while producing low pH hydroxides.
“Common sense says you can’t do it. Common sense also says that, in that situation, your membrane will fail significantly and be poisoned by calcium, magnesium and whatever other metals you have in the process,” says Mr Blunn. “Our particular electrochemical membrane configuration actually prevents that from happening, so we can still produce the solid products without fouling the membrane.”
This way of doing things has applications in hydrometallurgy – looking at sulphate treatment – and in cleaning acid mine drainage. ABR Process Development can recover iron hydroxide from mixed iron hydroxide products and sulphuric acid from acid mine drainage, and this is all done at a level where ninety five to one hundred per cent of the contaminants are removed from the water.
“We can make very, very clean water; it’s probably not aesthetically or ideally potable water but it is certainly a lot friendlier and significantly less damaging to the environment than acid mine drainage. It’s water with a neutral pH. Effectively no iron or copper or anything like that remains – there might be some residual magnesium, say one hundred parts per million,” explains Mr Blunn.
ABR spent considerable time trying to find the ideal solution, working with a small waste processor in Australia and looking at different industrial galvanisers. Galvanising waste is originally very high in hydrochloric acid, iron and zinc, so the first step was looking at how to separate the iron and zinc in order to make the waste less hazardous. A pilot plant has been set up which, using ABR’s technology, has led to a program to recover the separated iron and zinc as well as the acid.
The only way to come up with such brilliant solutions to the challenges of waste recovery is with the considerable breadth of experience that can be found at ABR Process Development. Most employees have experience in mining, agriculture or waste treatment. Adam attended the regional university, gaining a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in technology management. The company has a board with experts in the fields of chemical engineering, mechanical engineering and management. During the research periods, due to the expertise that is available within the company, it is able to work on a shoestring budget.
“Most of the ideas come from small contracts that give us the opportunity to see other problems, and networking to figure out what the toothaches are,” says Mr Blunn. “We didn’t start off and say, ‘Oh we’re going to find a way to recover sulphuric acid from mining waste.’ We were actually doing some work – as we happened to have some samples we were able to identify the problem. Nobody looked at or seriously thought that there was a possibility of recovering magnesium from magnesium sulphate solutions. We just happened to do the right thing at the right time, wonder if it had application, and then we tried to understand what we had done. To me, the term ‘toothaches’, when it comes to chemical processing, are things that need attention and will get budgetary approval to fix.”
The mining industry has been seen by some as environmentally unfriendly and wasteful, its waste products as both expensive to treat and dangerous. ABR Process Development’s technologies, however, have done much to reverse these impressions while being of significant benefit both to the industry and the environment. Truly, the company’s success is everyone’s success. Quellen: http://www.resourceinfocus.com.au/index.php/2013/...cess-development/ http://www.resourceinfocus.com.au/brochures/RIFAUJun2013/ RIF_ABR_June2013_Brochure/ Die wichtigste Kernaussage in diesem Text ist, dass ABR (das Unternehmen) die Barrier Bay Technologie benutzt um eine neuartige Technologie zu entwickeln. Wasseraufbereitung/Management im Bergbau sowie im Industriebereich ist ein Milliardenmarkt und eröffnet ungeahnte Wertschöpfungsmöglichkeiten für die Beteiligten Unternehmen an der Technologie. Da im neuen Prozess auch die Barrier Bay Technologie (50% Proto Resources) als Kerntechnologie enthalten ist, muss ich davon ausgehen, dass hier eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen beiden Unternehmen (ABR/Proto Resources - Barrier Bay) besteht. Ich denke, dass hier durch Barrier Bay eine Tür geöffnet worden ist, welche es Proto Aktionären erlaubt an einer einzigartigen Technologie teilzuhaben. http://www.abrprocess.com/about.html
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