Ucore says Wicheeda rare earth carbonate suitable for commercial-scale processing
Ucore Rate Metals (TSXV: UCU) has deemed a 26-tonne sample of mixed rare earth carbonate (MREC) from the Wicheeda mine to be suitable for processing on a commercial scale using Ucore’s RapidSX technology. The sample was tested at Ucore’s RapidSX commercialization and demonstration facility in Kingston, Ontario.
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Rio Tinto gets $13 million from Canada to decarbonize iron ore processing
Rio Tinto said on Monday that the Canadian government had awarded it C$18 million ($13 million) to decarbonize iron ore processing in Labrador West.
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Guinea talks carbon tax on mines as it seeks $4.3 billion loans
Guinea is planning to introduce a carbon tax on mining companies as it started talks with United Arab Emirates investors to raise $4.3 billion to fund development projects.
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Sumitomo cuts nickel output forecast in Madagascar due to system glitches
Japanese trading house Sumitomo Corp on Monday slashed its output estimate of nickel at its Ambatovy project in Madagascar due to system glitches.
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Plane carrying Rio Tinto workers crashes in Canada’s Northwest
Six people were killed after a small plane carrying global miner Rio Tinto’s workers crashed near Fort Smith in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories (NWT) on Tuesday, the NWT Coroner Service said on Wednesday.
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Plane carrying Rio Tinto workers crashes in Canada’s Northwest, six dead
A small plane carrying Rio Tinto (ASX, LON: RIO) workers crashed near Fort Smith in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories on Tuesday during a flight to its Diavik diamond mine, killing six people on board.
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Gem Diamonds and Lucara find first big stones of 2024
Africa-focused miners Gem Diamonds (LON: GEMD) and Lucara Diamond (TSX: LUC) have recovered big, high-quality Type IIa diamonds at their respective operations.
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Three initiatives lead the way in decarbonizing steel production
Mining News Pro - Electrical equipment multinational ABB released a report spotlighting three initiatives that are using carbon capture technology, hydrogen and electrochemistry as routes to decarbonizing primary steel production.
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Palladium price drops below $1,000 as demand from key car sector wanes
Mining News Pro - Palladium dropped below $1,000 an ounce for the first time in five years as demand falters amid a slowdown in car sales, the rise of electric vehicles and as users switch to cheaper platinum.
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Stellantis to enter JV with Orano to recycle electric car batteries
Mining News Pro - Franco-Italian automaker Stellantis said on Tuesday it planned a joint venture with French nuclear fuels firm Orano to recycle used electric vehicle batteries and scrap materials from its gigafactories in Europe and North America.
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In Australia’s outback, Rio Tinto prepares for a low carbon future
Mining News Pro - In the red, dusty outback of the Pilbara in Western Australia, the world’s biggest iron ore miner Rio Tinto is preparing for a low carbon future as it maps out new sources of the raw material to ship to the world’s steelmaking industry.
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Fortescue to divert carbon offset funds to decarbonization
Mining News Pro - Australia’s Fortescue said on Friday it will divert funds that were allocated to carbon offsets towards decarbonization in a bid to achieve “Real Zero” by 2030.
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Fortescue to divert carbon offset funds to decarbonization
Mining News Pro - Australia’s Fortescue said on Friday it will divert funds that were allocated to carbon offsets towards decarbonization in a bid to achieve “Real Zero” by 2030.
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Decarbonization in mining still a long way off
Mining News Pro - A lack of consistent data to measure emissions down the supply chain of mining companies and through to customers makes it difficult to monitor and meet targets for decarbonizing the sector, industry executives and investors said on Thursday.
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Lithium players race for breakthrough to meet electric car demand
Mining News Pro - On the outskirts of El Dorado — heart of Arkansas’ 1920s oil boom — a company backed by Koch Industries Inc. is looking to dramatically speed up extraction of a battery metal essential to weaning the world off fossil fuels, while proving naysayers wrong in the process.
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Rio Tinto inks agreement with Madagascar government on QMM operations
Mining News Pro - Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) announced Wednesday it has reached an agreement with the government of Madagascar on future fiscal arrangements for QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM) and renewed their partnership for its sustainable operation.
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Rio Tinto, Sumitomo to make low-carbon alumina at Queensland refinery
Mining News Pro - Rio Tinto said on Wednesday it would build a hydrogen plant in Gladstone, Queensland along with Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, as the miner seeks to minimize carbon emissions at its Yarwun alumina refinery.
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Rio Tinto, Sumitomo to make low-carbon alumina at Queensland refinery
Mining News Pro - Rio Tinto said on Wednesday it would build a hydrogen plant in Gladstone, Queensland along with Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, as the miner seeks to minimize carbon emissions at its Yarwun alumina refinery.
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Biden’s electric car sales plan to strain critical mineral supplies
Mining News Pro - Stellantis NV and Toyota Motor Corp. blasted a Biden administration plan to squelch auto pollution, saying it would compel aggressive and unrealistic sales of electric vehicles that strain critical mineral supplies.
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Rio Tinto inks deal to bring iron ore rail car manufacturing to Pilbara
Mining News Pro - Mining giant Rio Tinto said on Tuesday it will partner with Western Australia-based Gemco Rail to bring local iron ore rail car manufacturing and bearing maintenance to the Pilbara region.
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Glencore, carmakers lead $1bn acquisition of Appian nickel-copper mines in Brazil
Mining News Pro - Private equity firm Appian Capital Advisory is selling its wholly owned Atlantic Nickel and Mineração Vale Verde operations in Brazil to ACG Acquisition Company Limited (LON: ACG) for $1 billion cash, with capital coming from battery metals hungry actors, including Glencore (LON: GLEN) and Volkswagen.
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Mt Carbine mine sees new contract
Mining News Pro - Golding Contractors has signed a contract with EQ Resources (EQR) for the restart of the open pit mining operations at the Mt Carbine tungsten project.
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Rio Tinto look to low carbon future
Mining News Pro - Major miner Rio Tinto is looking into the role that steel and iron ore will play in creating an energy efficient future.
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Receiver named for assets of Trevali’s Caribou zinc mine in New Brunswick
Mining News Pro - Last summer, Trevali Mining applied for relief under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) and was granted the initial order in August. The next month it delisted its shares from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And this week, a receiver was appointed for the company’s assets at its Caribou lead-zinc-silver mine in New Brunswick.
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Carbon-capture plants also have harmful emissions — but there is a solution
Mining News Pro - In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the researchers explain that amines are compounds used in the chemical processes of carbon-capture plants and natural gas processing and refining plants. Amines are also used in certain pharmaceuticals, epoxy resins, and dyes.
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The problem is that amines could also be potentially harmful to the environment as well as a health hazard, making it essential to mitigate their impact. This requires accurate monitoring and predicting of a plant’s amine emissions, which has proven to be no easy feat since carbon-capture plants are complex and differ from one another.
This is where the new development comes in.
Tested in Niederhauẞen, on one of the largest coal-fired power plants in Germany, the solution was used for a full year to monitor a slipstream that is sent from the power station into a carbon capture pilot plant.
Stress test
The scientists created a stress test to study amine emissions under different process conditions. “We developed an experimental campaign to understand how and when amine emissions would be generated. But some of our experiments also caused interventions of the plant’s operators to ensure the plant was operating safely,” Susana Garcia, co-author of the study, said in a media statement.
These interventions led to the question of how to interpret the data. Are the amine emissions the result of the stress test itself, or have the interventions of the operators indirectly affected the emissions? This was further complicated by a general lack of understanding of the mechanisms behind amine emissions.
“In short, we had an expensive and successful campaign that showed that amine emissions can be a problem, but no tools to further analyze the data,” study co-author Berend Smit said. “When Susana Garcia mentioned this to me, it sounded indeed like an impossible problem to solve. But she also mentioned that they measured everything every five minutes, collecting many data.”
Looking for patterns
With the help of PhD student Kevin Maik Jablonka, the group developed a machine-learning approach that turned the amine emissions puzzle into a pattern-recognition problem.
“We wanted to know what the emissions would be if we did not have the stress test but only the operators’ interventions,” Smit explained. “This is a similar issue as we can have in finance; for example, if you want to evaluate the effect of changes in the tax code, you would like to disentangle the effect of the tax code from, say, interventions caused by the crisis in Ukraine.”
In the next step, Jablonka used powerful machine learning to predict future amine emissions from the plant’s data.
With this model, the team was able to predict the emissions caused by the interventions of the operators and then disentangle them from those induced by the stress test. They were also able to use the model to run all kinds of scenarios for reducing these emissions.
The conclusion of this work was described as “surprising”. As it turned out, the pilot plant had been designed for pure amine, but the measuring experiments were carried out on a mixture of two amines: 2-amino-2-methyl-1-propanol and piperazine. The scientists found out that those two amines respond in opposite ways: reducing the emission of one increases the emissions of the other.
“I am very enthusiastic about the potential impact of this work; it is a completely new way of looking at a complex chemical process,” Smit said. “This type of forecasting is not something one can do with any of the conventional approaches, so it may change the way we operate chemical plants.”
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