Clean TeQ’s cRIP and cRIL technologies can directly recover metals from leached ores, avoiding multiple processing steps.

Australian environmental and mining services group Clean TeQ offers miners a more environmentally friendly way of extracting value from ore bodies. By Wally Graham.

Clean TeQ is relatively new to the Australian Securities Exchange but the company has been around since 1989.

It has a long record of fundamental and applied experience in the field of ion exchange process design and technology.

Clean TeQ’s Clean-iX technology extracts metals from pulps and solutions using direct contact with resin either during leaching (resin-in-leach cRIL) or after leaching (resin-in-pulp cRIP).

The key advantage of cRIL and cRIP technology is that it can directly recover metals from leached ores, avoiding multiple processing steps.

Both cRIL and cRIP can achieve higher recoveries, which in turn reduces capital cost and reagent consumption.

“The key issue is recovering the valuable metals of interest in a concentrated form that allows direct recovery to a saleable final product,” Clean TeQ manager of project development Tony Chamberlain told Licence to Operate.

“With resins you can achieve low threshold levels of final impurities. Resins are selective and have a high capacity to load metals onto the surface of the resins.

“Due to the nature of the process and the direct recovery of metals, you can decrease the amount of water and tailings generated by the processing plant.

“So if the processing facility is discharging to a tailings storage facility, or recycling that water internally, you can get to very low discharge levels that are acceptable.”

The Clean-iX technology is based on the principle of continuous counter-current ion exchange to provide one of the most efficient and cost-effective extraction methods available.

It can deal with a wide range of feed streams in both acid and alkaline environments and has been successfully applied to both greenfield and brownfield operations.

Clean-iX can produce high recovery rates with optimised resin inventories and reagent use for a number of mineral processing applications, such as uranium, gold, base metals and water treatment.

It also has a demonstrated ability to economically extract precious metals from tailings discarded by processing circuits that use conventional technologies.

Resin performance is imperative to the success of Clean TeQ’s technology and understanding how resins interact with the process is vital for efficient design.

The Clean-iX resin catalogue comprises a range of application-specific resins that are the result of more than 50 years of development and processing resins for ion exchange applications.

The Clean TeQ in-house research and development team is constantly working to expand and upgrade the company’s resin capabilities.

The company also works with other commercial resin suppliers to give it extensive experience with all resins available in the market.

This allows Clean TeQ to provide its clients with optimal plant design as well as the best possible economic and environmental outcomes.

Clean TeQ has been fielding a number of enquiries from around the globe for its services.

It is currently working on a detailed design for a pilot plant incorporating the Clean-iX technology for a major gold miner in North America, and is acting as technical specialist in extraction and purification processes for a uranium and base metals project in South Africa.

The company is also working on a definitive feasibility study for a major uranium project in Western Australia.