From June up to November 2014 Elemetal has been very busy together with Attero with the preparation of a large scale pilot at the Deurne sight of Attero. During this pilot a revolutionary way of “heap leaching” will be tested on a large scale in concrete tunnels on bottom ash. To make a proper leaching test possible a solvent extraction (SX) and electrowinning (EW) circuit has been added to the setup. This SX/EW has been developed by Elemetal together with our partner Iontech, and is able to produce a maximum of 50 tonnes of copper per year.
Main goal of this project is to develop the leaching process on a “full scale” heap. The tunnel should be capable of processing batches of around 500 tonnes of bottom ash. From this tunnel the process can be scaled up modular by adding more tunnels. During the leaching of the copper, the copper will constantly be extracted from the “leaching solution” by the SX. It is expected that during this project up to 2600 kg of copper will be produced per batch of bottom ash.
