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Base Metals Recovery There are many base metals that are systematically produced by the mining industry. The reason they are sought is that they have economic value in many wholesale and finished product markets. There are a number of metals such as cobalt, chromium, lead, nickel, etc. that are purified using an electrowinning process. (People pay a lot of money to recover pure base metals, as evidenced by their willingness to apply expensive and often chemically risky preconcentration methods followed by intensive electrowinning that creates pernicious byproducts.) Typically with electrowinning, hydrogen or acid is generated as the metals are plated. Interestingly, cobalt has to be plated and crushed to remove the significant amounts of hydrogen gas that will form and be entrained within the metal matrix during electroplating. When hydrogen gas is generated, that is a sure sign of very poor energy efficiency and very high energy intensity. High energy intensity means very high operating cost and limited margin capture by a mining and minerals processing operation. Reticle Carbon reduces the operating cost and dramatically reduces energy consumption in commercial base metal recovery. In particular, Reticle carbon anodes and cathodes used in electrochemical cells reduce the overall voltage and energy consumption necessary to plate various base metals and the amount of gas that is produced during operation. Reticle Carbon offers very low operating and maintenance cost, improved economics, and low equipment installation costs. Worldwide, the base metals production industry and the market that drives it are absolutely colossal in scope. In aggregate, the worldwide base metals market represents as much as 4% of total world GNP. In the United States, mining comprises 4 percent of the $1 trillion gross national product. North American countries (U.S., Mexico and Canada) combined produce every metal commodity (except chromium which is controlled by a Russian monopoly) from mining. Mining is a mammoth market in which direct, immediate economic advantages of energy efficient, low cost, Reticle Carbon CDI for metal recovery from dilute solution can be realized. The range of applicability of Reticle Carbon to base metal recovery is very broad, almost unbelievably so. The following list, taken from the periodic table of the elements, presages this breadth of Reticle Carbon business that can be developed to address base or primary metal recovery: The Reticle Carbon CDI technology represents a "sustainable" solution for these metals. There are no onsite chemicals, no pernicious byproducts or coproducts, smaller-than-current energy consumption, and zero discharge except for perfectly clean water without any dissolved inorganics (if producers decide to discharge at all). |
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