A Periodic Table of Passive Treatment for Mining-Influenced Water

The technical community of regulators and engineers that specializes in passive water treatment should be familiar with the passive treatment “decision tree” that was published by the former US Bureau of Mines about 14 years ago.  The decision tree was originally intended to address mining influenced water (MIW) from coal mines.  But since then, the breadth of passive treatment has expanded to embrace precious and base metal mines, uranium mines, and even gravel pits.  Each MIW has its unique signature, either imposed by the natural geochemical conditions of the ore body and surrounding mine waste, or by resource recovery processes that may include heap leaching or traditional hydrometallurgical technologies.   In the context of the elements of the periodic table, the decision tree is no longer applicable as it was developed to focus on coal mining MIW which typically contains acidity/alkalinity, iron, aluminum and manganese.  For example, the decision tree doesn’t consider residual nitrates from blasting, cyanide from heap leach rinsing, trace amounts of selenium, or other parameters that may require passive treatment at a given mine, coal or otherwise.

 With advance apologies to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, this paper introduces a “Periodic Table of Passive Treatment” that focuses on identifying passive treatment methods that have been observed to work on specific elements or species of elements based on the author’s experience or other practitioners of the technology.