Erik Ronald wrote "The Curious Case of Metal Bias": "That said, I was in Chile recently looking at some IOCG deposits and was surprised to find a company operating several IOCG’s focused solely on copper. Nothing against copper of course; but when your deposit hosts an average Fe grade of 40 % and consistently runs between 0.25-0.4 g/t Au and 2 g/t Ag a company should likely aim to maximize what Mother Nature provided."
First, they write that they have 20-25% iron in the ore.
Consider an example.
After magnetic separation, La Planta Magnetita has the obtained iron concentrate with an iron content of 70 %. It's good.
The concentrate comprises 1.87 % of SiO2 and 0.52 % of Al2O3. This is very bad. These are harmful impurities. In fact, the content of silicates will be much greater than in laboratory experiments.
China refused to buy this concentrate with a high content of silicates.
In reality, the problem of removal of silicates and aluminosilicates from iron concentrate has not been solved so far.
Who will buy this concentrate from you?
Who will buy this concentrate from you?
They write that they can remove silicates by reverse flotation. It's half true.
The flotation has a problem. When adding a starch to the the flotation, the content of SiO2 in of iron concentrate is 0.8-0.9 %.
If carried out flotation without the starch then content of SiO2 in the iron concentrate is 0.8-0.9%.
Obviously, there is no effect from the use of starch.
What happened? Why in both cases the content of SiO2 in the iron concentrate equally high and much higher than the required?
Will they be able to solve this problem?
Ph.D. Natalia Petrovskaya
Some Persons suggest the following solutions to the problem:
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2. Develop an innovative technology (you will spend billions of dollars on technology development, development can take 20 years or more)
You have huge losses in any case.
The Internet has information that the Chinese demanded to reduce the content of silicates and aluminosilicates. For example, I also do not buy such a concentrate. I know all the requirements for concentrates.
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