CANMET’S R&D MANDATE

The Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (CANMET) is heavily involved in research and development of products and processes that reduce pollution in its many forms. The agency, a sector of Energy, Mines and Resources Canada, develops technologies to control global warming, reduce acid rain, prevent environmental spills and promote ecologically responsible waste management practices.

For example, in 1979, CANMET began research to perfect a technology for reducing sulphuric dioxide and nitrogen oxide released during fuel combustion. The two emissions are the chief cause of acid rain. CANMET keyed on fluidized bed combustion, the type of roasting process that Falconbridge Ltd. has incorporated in its Sudbury smelter.

CANMET’s work in this area has focused on thermal coal generating plants, rather than smelters such as Falconbridge’s. At the smelters, however, CANMET has developed and evaluated extraction processes that efficiently recover metal from base metal sulphide ores while producing elemental sulphur rather than sulphur dioxide.

In the category of waste management, CANMET is working on several fronts. For the gold industry, the government agency has devloped an acidification-volatilization-reneutralization (avr) process for recycling cyanide. The operation also concentrates the base metals in tailings water.

FOR THE GOLD INDUSTRY, CANMET HAS DEVELOPED AN AVR PROCESS FOR RECYCLING CYANIDE.

The aluminum industry is facing environmental and economic problems for the disposal of spent potlining-liners of electrolytic baths used in aluminum production. The potlining contains valuable aluminum and combustible carbon, as well as toxic cyanide, ammonia and fluoride compounds. CANMET developed a metal separator, which, as a protoype at Alcan Aluminum’s Jonquiere, Que., plant, recovered aluminum in sufficient grade to be recycled and converted.

CANMET has also worked in conjunction with Alcan and Carleton University in a project to study the use of micro-organisms to degrade sodium oxalate, a toxic substance produced as a byproduct of the Bayer process. This is the process that extracts alumina from bauxite.

Nuclear waste poses quite a separate disposal problem. The waste is radioactive and, so far, storage options are at best short-term solutions.

CANMET is also heavily involved in cutting underground and surface diesel emissions and controlling acidic drainage from tailings ponds. In the latter instance, the agency is a key player in the Mine Environment Neutral Drainage (MEND) program.