New economy minerals company Cobalt Blue says the stars are aligning in North-West Queensland for collaboration … or disaster.
As in the recent North Queensland flooding, one usually followed the other but that needn’t be the case Cobalt Blue Remine+ manager, Helen Degeling said.
Dr Degeling recently presented at the Mount Isa Future Ready Economy Roadmap forum in North-West Queensland.
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The planned closure of the Mount Isa copper smelter, which is pending an investment decision on a major maintenance program, would be a disaster for the North-West Queensland community and the wider economy, she said.
“The failure of regional Queensland and the regional Queensland mining industry has huge impacts for the economy of the state.
“Lots of people lose their jobs. Phosphate Hill then shuts down as well, and other copper projects, heap-leach projects that might have been mined don’t get up and running because there is no sulfuric acid.
“The vanadium industry, that’s supposed to be the next big thing, that doesn’t get up. It needs sulfuric acid, all of those things. It has huge impact with the state for all the people who don’t live in mining communities down in Brisbane.
“We don’t want it to get that way. We can all see these things that could become emergencies looming on the horizon. I think everybody here in this room today wants to see something happen before it becomes an emergency.”
Main image: High-grade copper mineralisation in the form of chalcopyrite. Chalcopyrite is a copper-bearing sulfide mineral that is the main copper ore in the Mount Isa deposit.
Demand for sulfuric acid in northern Queensland’s minerals sector is expected to soar from current levels of about 1.23Mtpa to reach 2.86Mtpa to 5.23Mtpa by 2035.
Cobalt Blue has signed an MOU with Mount Isa City Council to work together to develop a sulfuric acid supply in the event of the copper smelter closing.
Cobalt Blue is identifying suitable sites in the region with pyrite-rich tailings or waste to ‘remine’ for processing sulfuric acid.
There was little scope under current regulations to facilitate new mining processes, Dr Degeling said.
“We haven’t been mining these things for thousands of years. We’ve only really been trying to extract the last decade or couple of decades. So we don’t have that long history of expertise and long history of working and tweaking and perfecting tried and true techniques.
“Then risk appetite from governments to say, where I come from in terms of the tailing space, having the guts to look at current regulation and see how it doesn’t support tailings reprocessing operations and that is both the Mining Act and the Environmental Protection Act.”
Regulations developed last century were not meeting new opportunities, she said.
“(The EPA) and the Mining Act as well haven’t kept up with industry’s desire to do new things like reprocess tailings.
“So how we calculate bonds and how we apply regulations, how we think of a mining operation going from exploration, development, operation and production through to closure and then rehabilitation.
“That’s a very, very linear thing. But what if the greater value for a community is use of that site in some other way?”
