Brian Howlett Dundee Sustainable Technologies (DST) of Montreal, has provided an update on its industrial scale plant its proprietary arsenic stabilization technology.
Following the delivery and reassembly of the plant at the customer’s metals processing facility, the corporation has announced that the hot commissioning has been successfully completed.
Management confirms that approximately three tonnes of arsenic-bearing material have been converted into briquettes and processed through the batch plant and that two tonnes of glass has been produced with an estimated arsenic content of 5 percent. Testing of the glass for disposal safety will be completed in the coming weeks.
The plant, funded by the customer, was constructed in Thetford Mines, QC, and delivered to the customer’s metal processing facility in 2018 where it began a 12-month operation period.
The next phase will be an extended operations campaign of up to twelve months in order to produce eight tonnes of arsenical glass per day on a continuous mode to demonstrate the robustness of the process under varying feed conditions. The goal is for the DST technology to safely sequester the arsenic in the glass at an arsenic concentration of up to 20 percent while meeting or exceeding the USEPA Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Protocol.
Brian Howlett, the president and CEO of Dundee Sustainable Technologies commented, “This operation of this plant is a milestone achievement for the corporation and will allow us to begin to commercialize our arsenic process in earnest. The corporation has numerous commercial opportunities under discussion and the hot commissioning of the plant should accelerate contractual arrangements. Management is proud to display a short video of the Plant in operation at the first pour of arsenical glass.”
As reported before, the objective of the project is to confirm, at the industrial scale, the amenability of the DST technology for the treatment of flue dusts produced by the facility. During the operation campaign data will be collected and a study will be performed to evaluate the technical and economic implications of a potential full-scale DST arsenic vitrification plant located at the facility.
As previously announced in a press release dated January 24, 2018, this project is partially funded by the Government of Canada through Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
The DST Technology is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of arsenic-bearing feed material and uses lower cost inputs to produce a product that is more stable and more cost effective than current industrial practices.
DST’s innovative method to stabilize arsenic is becoming an attractive technique to capture and sequester the arsenic and is applicable for deposits or concentrates considered to contain arsenic concentrations too high to be exploited using conventional approaches.
In previous pilot scale tests, the resulting glass is non-toxic and meets or exceeds the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) toxicity characterization leaching procedure (TCLP, Method 1311).
The company expects the results from this industrial demonstration to meet or exceed the same standard.
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