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Business/Finance See other Business/Finance Articles Title: Using bacteria to mine expensive metals A container of greenish liquid gets dumped into a large metal bin containing mineralized rock and sediment. Gradually, the temperature in the container rises as the liquid begins to react with the rock. The liquid doesn't burn or erode the rocky matter... It literally eats it. When the process is finished, and the liquid has digested its way to the bottom of the batch, a group of workers processes the remains. The result? An almost 100% pure and easily separable cocktail of copper, silver, nickel, zinc, uranium, lithium, molybdenum, and vanadium. Advertisement "This one company will put China out of business in less than 3 years!" China's control of the world's supply of rare earth metals is officially over. And you can thank this company for making it happen. - Click Here - Perhaps even more amazing is that the liquid leaves almost no by-products. No bio-hazardous materials or radioactive waste — or anything that would require a HazMat team dressed in spacesuits to safely transport and dispose. When the workers are finished with one bin, the solution is simply collected and pumped into the next one, and the process starts all over again. But here's where things turn for the surreal... The green liquid added to the mineralized rock isn't a liquid at all, but a living, breathing, mass — with a very big appetite. Rock-Eating Microbes Utilizing bacteria which actually live off iron, sulfur, and a number of other less valuable elements, a highly-innovative resource company operating out of Northern Alberta is pioneering a process called bio-heap leaching to gain access to valuable metals that, just a few years ago, were hopelessly inaccessible. First invented in the 1970s to extract copper from hard-to-reach deposits, heap leaching primarily uses acid to dissolve valuable material from a rocky matrix. Take a look at this diagram to better see this process: alex-image But in the last three decades, advancements in the development of a far more versatile, biological solution to replace the acid has put the process on the forefront of modern science. Today, dozens of bacterial cocktails have been synthesized and optimized to extract everything from uranium to lithium to the old favorites, gold and silver, from some of the most expensive-to-mine mineral formations known. It's cheap, it's clean — and it's as close to self-sustaining as any other recovery method used in the mineral resources industry. Advertisement How to Invest in Canada's 127% "Safety Deposit Box" Would you like having secure access to $160 billion worth of untapped Yukon gold? You don't need to be a Canadian citizen — and in fact, it's much easier than you think. The free informational report with all the details can be viewed right here. The biggest advantage, however, is the degree to which bio-heap leaching can transform topography unfit for traditional mining... into highly lucrative industrial and precious metal production sites. Right now, the company I'm talking about stands virtually alone in developing and perfecting this cutting-edge process. Of course, an outfit working on something this revolutionary isn't going to waste the opportunity on just any random chunk of available real estate... They currently hold the mineral rights to a 2,500-square-kilometer property (that's 900 square miles, or half the size of Delaware) in Northern Alberta, which in recent years has gotten a great deal of attention for its mushrooming shale oil industry. Taking the most modest estimates available, drill tests indicate this property contains $1.71 billion just in copper, silver, and zinc, which it will be able to tap over the course of the next several years with a series specially-optimized bio-heap leaching solutions. From the very start of production, the cost of recovery will be a small fraction of that of a traditional mining operation. Not bad for a company currently trading at 60 cents — with a total market cap of less than $40 million. In fact, this story was so compelling that last fall, we took a helicopter trip to see exactly what was going on with our own eyes. You wouldn't believe what they had to show us... Click here to get the full story. Poster Comment: DNI Metals: Alberta Black Shale Metals Projects Athabasca Region Alberta, Canada DNI Metals Inc. holds six contiguous mineral properties in northeast Alberta, comprising a 2,720 sq km land position over near-surface metal enriched black shales which are locally enriched in Molybdenum, Nickel, Uranium, Vanadium, Zinc, Copper, Cobalt, Silver, Gold, Lithium, Specialty Metals and Rare Earth Elements. DNI has identified six polymetallic 100-300 sq km systems on its land position, including two “open” Mineralized Zones* which are DNI’s principal targets for further exploration, one of which comprises 1.4-1.5 billion short tons extending over 26 sq km, and the other is 125-151 million short tons extending over 4.5 sq km. DNI is evaluating the potential of the polymetallic black shales as a long term source of base and precious metals, Uranium, specialty metals and Rare Earth Elements. DNI has delineated a 250 million short ton initial inferred resource over a 5.7 sq km portion of one of its six Zones believed to extend over 26 sq km with potential for hosting 1.4-1.5 billion short tons. [more..] Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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