Gangue

Tailing ponds are one of the greatest environmental challenges that the Oil Sands Industries of Alberta and other locations in the world face today. Tailing Ponds can be described as large “dump holes” in which the industry exposes of all the waste materials obtained from the refinement of Bitumen - a raw material which can be processed into oil. Tailing Ponds include many different types of waste materials such as water, fine silts, residual bitumen, salts and soluble organic compounds. They also include solvents that are added to the oil sands during the separation process. After the oil has been extracted from the sand the residue is dumped into the tailings and quickly settles to the very bottom. A layer on top of the hardened sand is a mixture of clay and tailing called fine tailing. This mixture of clay and water is highly unstable in the environment as it takes many years to settle and solidify, even after many years the texture of this mixture may be that of yogurt. it may take as long as or even more than 30 years for a tailing pond to fully be reclaimed. The main reason why I chose this ecological issue of tailing ponds is because as a Canadian citizen who lives in Alberta, Fort McMurray - a city which has often been labeled the least environmentally friendly city of Canada - I feel that I should be very much aware of the damages that our economical practices have on the environment. I think that because Fort McMurray is one of the cities that does the most…

VMS deposits occur in a diversity of shapes ranging from flat lens shaped to large sheet-like sulphide mineral rich bodies (Allen, et al., 2002). The preferred environment for these deposits to form in is submarine near a seafloor opening i.e. black smokers, where hydrothermal fluids escape and precipitate on the ocean bottom (Evans & Moon, 2006). The mineralogy of Kidd Creek VMS deposits often consists out of more than 60 different ore minerals and ore-related gangue minerals, of which 90% or…

Particle size plays an important role in evaluating the quality and performance of a mineral processing plant (Horiba 2014, 1). It also influences many of the properties of a particulate such as its reaction rate with some reagents. Particle size analysis is significant in determining the quality of ore grind and in establishing the degree of liberation of the valuable materials from the gangue (Haldar 2013, 227). This is done by mineral processing plants to ensure that the desired particle size…