Achieving a Green Transition for Mining

InnoGlobal supporting the green transition using our digital technologies

InnoGlobal was approached by a large mining corporation seeking to adopt advanced technologies to improve
their environmental impact through energy reduction, resource conservation and protection. Wet milling is the dominant process in mineral comminution, and our attention focused on the potential to convert this process to a dry methodology. For mineral processing, the choice where possible to transition from energy-intensive wet milling to less energy-intensive dry milling is critical, particularly in dry regions where water scarcity, environmental protection, and water treatment costs are significant.

The facts

3% of the world-generated electricity is consumed in mineral comminution. Electricity consumption for the same particle size reduction is around 15–50% lower when using a dry rather than a wet milling system. Typically, a mine would use circa 0.350 m3 water/ metric ton of ore-grade rock from processes such as milling, heap leaching, flotation, gravity, dust suppression.

Innopharma Technology succeeded in the conversion to a dry size reduction process by using our in-line and real-time particle sizing technology and our Smart Manufacturing platform, to achieve much tighter control of end product particle size distribution than obtained by the pre- existing wet process. This led to improved predictability of the downstream process of ore concentration and overall yield. Furthermore, the use of Eyecon2 to monitor the process enabled the customer to protect their environmental and energy efficiency gains through in-time fault detection and maximising process uptime. It is estimated that a 25% reduction in overall operational (water and electricity) consumption for this process was achieved.