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Rejected mine water plan deprived 7 000 of jobs – Robinson

Veteran research commentator Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson tells Mining Weekly Online’s Martin Creamer how the acid mine drainage curse could have been turned into 7 000 jobs at the abandoned Grootvlei gold mine in Springs. Video: Nicholas Boyd. Video Editing: Lionel da Silva.

2nd July 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The rejection of a still-workable mine water and slimes dam plan at the stricken Grootvlei gold mine on Gauteng’s East Rand deprived 7 000 squatter camp dwellers of employment and set the mine on its downward trajectory, which has arguably ended up as the harshest aspect of the Aurora liquidation debacle.

Veteran researcher Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson this week recalled in the attached Creamer Media video that an economically viable plan to clean Grootvlei’s polluted mine water and at the same time provide work in urban agriculture would have blazed a trail for other acid-mine-drainage (AMD) gold mines to follow, by treating AMD at zero cost to the mines and providing ongoing employment in this job-starved region.

The way would also have been opened for ongoing underground gold mining at Grootvlei, which still has a considerable volume of gold-bearing ore under water and where thousands of mineworkers lost their jobs.

The saleable iron oxide, cobalt and many other by-products recovered in the process would have provided important revenue streams to underpin the water clean-up.

But Robinson reports that his proposal was turned down in favour of another scheme, which proved unsuccessful and had to be discontinued despite millions of rands being expended on it.

The one-time National Institute for Metallurgy, now Mintek, director proposed the ion-exchange AMD-eradication process to Grootvlei to replace the mine’s standard lime method of treating AMD, the precipitates from which were killing fish in the nearby Blesbokspruit wetland, which in terms of Article 3.2 of the Ramsar Convention, was placed on the Montreux Record in 1996, owing to the ecological character of this wetland being threatened by AMD.

The process that the former Sentrachem director of mining chemicals and explosives offered to Grootvlei was able to absorb AMD’s sulphuric acid and provide a revenue stream by recovering for sale all the toxic elements, including red ferric oxide, which had saleable value as pigment or as pelletised iron oxide.

A second iron-exchange procedure would then absorb all the cobalt, copper, nickel, uranium and calcium, leaving what was virtually distilled water, ideal for agricultural irrigation because of its built-in ammonium sulphate fertiliser, in very dilute form.

Simultaneously, nigh nuclear-grade uranium, cobalt oxide and copper oxide would be produced, all with saleable value and the process resin easily regenerated with the addition of lime or caustic soda.

Taking that into account, Grootvlei would have been able to treat its AMD at zero cost to itself and would have given jobs to about 7 000 people in the nearby squatter camp, just outside Grootvlei.

“We thought this was a winner,” Robinson recalled to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online. (Also watch video attached).

But the Department of Water Affairs official responsible rejected the proposal, which formed part of a competitive tender in which the chosen alternative gave off such offensive odours that it was discontinued.

“Effectively, he said to us, ‘over my dead body will any water be used for agriculture until everybody in the country has got proper domestic water supply',” reminisced Robinson, who has been associated with the South African mining industry since 1949 and who formed part of the initiative launched by the now defunct Johannesburg Consolidated Investments to address the AMD problem in the 1990s.

The whole thing fell flat and with no water plan, Grootvlei's days as a working mine started drawing to a close.

But Robinson’s proposal is still implementable even at this late stage and his same technology could also be deployed to detoxify the other mine slimes dams across the Witwatersrand basin and turn them into drip-irrigated agricultural sites within job-generating mining clusters.

A host of crops could be grown in these slimes dam areas, which could also make use of domestic effluent water in all major cities, including the likes of Welkom, which has become something of a ghost town since the closure of the gold mines around it.

Instead, government is now being forced to deal with growing near-mine devastation.

For example, in June last year, the Gauteng provincial government was forced to take steps to assist communities in the aftermath of the Aurora liquidation at the abandoned Grootvlei mine, after the mine hostel was condemned as being unfit for human habitation.

The provincial government, together with the City of Ekurhuleni, has had to assist more than 250 families left stranded in the wake of the liquidation of Aurora, which bought Grootvlei gold mine out of the liquidation of the formerly JSE-listed and black-controlled Pamodzi Gold.

The inexperienced Aurora bought the liquidated Pamodzi Gold East Rand assets in September 2009, which was the last piece of the stricken Pamodzi Gold group to be bought out of liquidation.

In June 2011, Pamodzi Gold East Rand’s joint provisional liquidators were forced to take steps with the Department of Water Affairs to prevent what was described as a potential “major ecological disaster".

Later, the Department of Water and Sanitation initiated the development of a far more expansive AMD treatment plant and pumpstation at Grootvlei’s No 3 shaft, and these are scheduled to be fully operational by the first quarter of 2016.

The facility’s operational target is to neutralise about 84 Mℓ/d in mine AMD treatment plants as partial treatment solutions, which entail the removal of metals and a significant reduction in the acidity of the water.

However, these plants’ technologies do not completely remove sulphur from the water, which still remains at an unacceptable level of about 2 500 mg/ℓ.

The partially treated AMD water is discharged back into the Vaal river system near the Vaal River Barrage Reservoir, with the department commiting to downstream water users of the barrage that it will comply with a standard of 600 mg/ℓ total dissolved solids.

Thus, when partially treated AMD is discharged into the barrage that contains more than 600 mg/ℓ, that water has to be diluted by good-quality water, which is why the deparment is now planning to fund the building of desalination plants to treat AMD further and to remove the saline water from the Vaal river system.

A decision on this is expected to made soon and involve a capital cost of some R10-billion to build, with the cost of treating the AMD water estimated at between R12/m3 and R18/m3.

These are huge capital costs with no mention of the commercial potential of the metals and minerals recovered nor any mention of the sustainable job generation that South Africa so urgently needs.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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