EnviroGold Global Ltd, the technology company seeking to enable the global mining industry to monetise valuable metals contained in mine waste and tailings including gold, silver, copper, zinc, and nickel, has provided an update on its plans to demonstrate and commercialise its proprietary leaching technology – the NVRO Clean Leach Process. EnviroGold has selected a manufacturer to construct the processing unit that will be used to demonstrate the NVRO Clean Leach Process to several potential customers, including major global mining companies.
In addition, EnviroGold says it has received an indicative quote for the construction and containerisation of the unit, which is materially less than initially estimated. The company expects these developments will allow it to commence commercial demonstrations of the NVRO Clean Leach Process during the fourth quarter of 2024.
The company has received interest from several major mining companies asking that it locate the NVRO Clean Leach Process processing unit at their mine sites. To better streamline the testing process and serve multiple clients in quick succession, the company has opted to construct and install the unit at a centralised industrial facility near Brisbane, Australia, managed by the EnviroGold technical team.
It says: “There are several benefits of installing the processing plant at a centralised location, which include, allowing multiple mines to ship tailings for processing and testing, eliminating regulatory and environmental permitting issues associated with mine site development, and allowing the company to decrease turnaround time between mining company demonstrations.”
Under this arrangement, customer tailings will be transported to the NVRO demonstration facility, processed using the NVRO Clean Leach Process with the residues transported back to the mine for disposal. The tailings throughput and data collected throughout each project’s tailings processing operations it says will be sufficient to enable customers to proceed to scale up, front end engineering, and design and project economic assessments.
In addition to allowing multiple mine sites to test the NVRO Clean Leach Process, the demonstration plant will allow the Company to extrapolate its findings into the necessary data for the bankable feasibility study required to fully commercialise the business. It believes that having this will dramatically reduce timelines for major mining companies to deploy the NVRO Clean Leach Process on a much larger commercial scale.
“This is a very exciting development that we expect will decrease the time and cost to begin showcasing the NVRO Clean Leach Process and allow the Company to demonstrate its technology to more customers in less time,” said CEO David Cam.
The process uses a weak acid leach technology that operates at atmospheric pressure, relatively low temperature using an exothermic reaction, with a short 1-hour residency time. It does not necessarily require fine grinding to optimise metal recovery from complex ores, and the acid acts as a catalyst in a self-sustaining chain reaction, and little of it is consumed. An acid recycling circuit serves to further control costs.
