1

ENERGY AND MINERAL EXPLOITATION TECHNIQUES

P.G. Kihlstedt

Division of Mineral Processing, Royal Institute of

Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

Introduction

Mineral production nowadays is only to at small

degree a matter of blasting and excavating natural
mineral deposits in order to produce rocks for direct
use as the raw materials of metallurgical or chemical
processes. In this century an important intermediate
step has come into being - mineral processing - in
which the raw mineral wealth of nature is dressed to
make optimum mineral products suited to subsequent
processes and uses.

This development is progressing rapidly, naturally

urged on by economic factors - primarily the great
savings that can be made in the cost of the end
products by simple and cheap removal of worthless
material and troublesome impurities through physical
dressing processes at the raw material stage. Mineral
processing also makes it possible to divide the raw
material into a number of mineral products with
distinct uses. This is particularly important in the
case of complex sulphide ores, where the same raw
material can for example be made to yield separate
concentrates for the production of lead, copper, zinc
and pyrite. The most widely used method of concentra-
tion is flotation, which can produce mineral concen-
trates containing 80 to 90% of pure metal mineral
with metal yields of the order of 95% at low cost.
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In mineral dressing by drying, granulation or sinter-

ing it is also important to produce mineral inter-
mediates with physical properties suitable for
further treatment, which often takes the form of
metallurgical or chemical processes in which gases
or solutions are passed through the mineral for the
purpose of reduction or leaching. For such purposes
the product must be sufficiently permeable and react-
ive, and it is therefore agglomerated to a great
extent into porous pellets of uniform size. Further-
more, mineral products must not be delivered at
their de s tination in a dusty or sticky form, as t h is
interferes with further processing.

Although purely economic considerations are the chief

driving forpes behind the advance of mineral process-
ing techn6logy, the present-day shortage of energy
also plays a parallel part. The energy aspect be-
comes particularly important when careful design _of
the mineral benification process, for example, can
save large quantities of scarce coke for reduction
or when the problem is to extract metals from very
low-grade ores at a reasonable total expenditure of
energy. Examples of such savings will be given in
what follows.

Modern mineral processing has adopted similar methods

and similar approaches for all types of minerals,
whether they be metalliferous ores, chemical raw
materials, bulk industrial minerals for highway and
building constructions, or solid fuels. Thus the
mineral industry no longer draws such a sharp divid-
ing line as it once did between ores and stony
minerals; the same industry exploits widely varying
types of mineral deposits. There is a clear trend
towards a unified, universal mineral technology. By
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the same toke~ processing methods are no longer con-

fined to the original physical methods of crushing,
screening and jigging that were the stock-in-trade
of mineral dressing at the turn of the century. The
scene today is dominated by sophisticated grinding
techniques, electrical and magnetic dressing
techniques, flotation techniques based on surface
chemistry, chemical leaching techniques and thermal
agglomeration techniques. Mineral processing in-
dustries have become large and capital-intensive,
with installations that require little manual labour
but a high input of mechanization. They make it
possible to maintain a steady supply of minerals to
satisfy the needs of society from ever poorer and
more impure natural mineral deposits.

The unit operations of mineral processing

The techniques employed in present-day exploitation

of mineral deposits are many-faceted and utilize
scientific and technological advances from many
fields. Certain steps and unit operations, however,
recur frequently in the logical progression from
mining and recovery from the deposit through the
mechanical breakdown of the material to lumps and
particles suitable for processing, possibly grinding
to liberation of the valuable minerals contained in
the raw material, separation of the raw material and
concentration of the wanted minerals to the final
physical preparation of the valuable products for
metallurgical or chemical processing of for direct
use in their extant form as for example structural
materials, refractories or fuels.

Table I summarizes a number of such steps and unit

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operations, listing the respective amounts of energy

they consume. As far as possible the energy consump-
tion here has been calculated to include not only the
electric power and fuel actually used in the process
but also the energy required to produce reagents,
additives and other necessary materials. Thus the
energy figure for mining takes account of explosives
and steel for drill bits and wear, and steel con-
sumption has likewise been reckoned into the energy
consumption of grinding operations. Thus a con-
sumption of 1 kg of steel balls per ton of crude ore
is equivalent to an energy consumption of about
5 kWh per ton of crude ore.

Let us follow the operations of mineral exploitation

step by step:

1. Mining. The traditional method is underground

mining, where the raw material is excavated without
removal of adjacent rock or overburden; the excavated
volume may or may not be filled in again. Where there
are large deposits at reasonable depths, however, the
considerably cheaper technique of open-pit mining is
employed; here the overburden is excavated from the
deposit and also to some extent from adjacent rock
to obtain stable slopes. In both cases the raw
material is brought to the surface by trucks or con-
veyors, or in underground mines more commonly by
vertical hoisting in skips. The energy demand comes
from drilling, blasting, loading, preliminary crush-
ing, transport of material to the surface, ventila-
tion and water pumping.

2. Comminution of the raw material. The raw material

when it comes to the surface is normally in lumps
with a k size of about 250 mm (k denotes the
80 80
width of a mesh through which 80% of the material
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will pass). Successive stages of crushing break down

the raw material to decimetre or centimetre size,
either for direct use as, say, lump ore or macadam,
or as an intermediate for further grinding. Since the
mineral crystals in crystalline rocks have an average
size of about 0,2 rnrn, grinding to liberate these
crystals is normally carried to a k 80 of 200~m or
perhaps as far as 50~m. The specific energy demand
of this fine grinding increases in inverse proportion
to the square root of k , with an addition of more
80
than 50% for consumption of grinding media by wear
and tear. Thus 10 kWh/ton of grinding energy carries
a surcharge of over 5 kWh/ton for steel consumption.
In autogenous grinding, the direct energy consumption
is about 50% higher per ton, but on the other hand
the steel consumption is much lower. In autogenous
grinding the coarse raw material is ground direct
to about k 80 lOO;Um without prior crushing, the
material itself acting as the grinding medium.

3. Separation of the raw material and concentration

of the valuable minerals. Various screening and
concentrating operations come under this heading.
They can be performed in the dry state, or with the
material slurried in water. A variety of physical,
surface-chemical and hydrometallurgical methods are
employed to remove deadrock from the mineral mass in
the form of tailings, which must be disposed of in
some ecologically acceptable manner. The various
valuable minerals are concentrated to optimum product
compositions for subsequent industrial processes; the
aim here is to reach a recovery around 95% of the
valuable minerals and at the same time obtain a high
concentration of the valuable metals, usually an 80
to 90% pure grade, and a low grade of impurities that
are difficult to remove by metallurgical or chemical
means. Efforts are also made to influence the residual
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gangue content of the concentrates to obtain a favour-

able slag composition in the metallurgical processes.

4. Physical preparation of the valuable products. As

I mentioned earlier, concentration methods may be
either wet or dry. The resulting products may have
to be dewatered and in many cases agglomerated to
an optimum shape and consistency for subsequent treat-
ment in metallurgical or chemical processes, or for
manufacture of finished mineral products. Granulation
and agglomeration processes are not only important
from the point of view of permeabilit y and r educibil-
ity; in metallurgical and chemical processes there is
also a desire to be able to automate handl i ng
operations, and this demands materials which are uni-
form in terms of both composition and particle size.
Crushing and grinding operations, however, produce
a statistical distribution of particle sizes from a
maximum down to about l~m, so for purposes of auto-
mation it may be necessary to granulate the material
to particles of a uniform size of, say, 5 mm.

As may be seen from Table I, the energy consumption

.
per ton of material treated is fairly low in the case
of physical unit operations. This leads to the obvious
conclusion that it pays to remove as much as possible
of the worthless gangue and other impurities before
proceeding to smelting or chemical processes where the
energy consumption is normally reckoned in megawatt-
hours per ton of material treated. Separation and con-
centration of metalliferous raw materials are therefore
the rule today, and the need for such operations has
grown more acute with the steep rise in fuel prices.
It may be added that the dry processes are not always
economical of energy, partly due to the need to dry
the material and partly to the attendant extraction
and recovery of dust. Wet processes, on the other hand,
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may require a heavy expendit~re of energy for dewater-

ing and drying, which must be taken into account. The
energy demand also shoots up as soon as elevated tem-
peratures are used in such operations as sintering,
calcination, and certainly smelting.

Mineral technology in steel production

The importance of removing worthless components of the

ore ahead of metallurgical processes can be illustrated
by a study of the energy consumption associated with
steel production. Table II outlines an example of
energy consumption in an imaginary steel-making
operation using Swedish magnetite ore from an under-
ground mine~ In this case there is a conversion factor
of 3 for ore to metal.

The amount of energy needed to reduce the ore in the

blast furnace depends among other things on the amount
of slag obtained, and this in turn depends on the
purity of the ore concentrate as produced and sintered.
In blast furnaces with a relatively low iron grade in
the charge the amount of slag is between 800 and l 200
kg per ton of crude iron, whereas the highly con-
centrated charges used in Sweden give between 200 and
300 kg of slag per ton of crude iron. The saving in
coke is about 20 kg for every 100 kg reduction in the
amount of slag. Upgrading the iron ore concentrate from
58 to 65% Fe reduces the specific slag production from
450 to 200 kg per ton of crude iron, which represents
and energy saving of about 375 kWh per ton of crude
steel. The concentration to achieve this upgrading
requires an energy input of about 25 kWh per ton of
crude steel, so advanced mineral concentration gives
a great saving of energy.
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Preparation of iron ore products from minerals by

agglomeration is likewise an energy-saving procedure,
even though the various sintering methods in them-
selves are fairly expensive in terms of energy. Im-
proved agglomeration methods which give optimum lump
size, low swelling, high reduction strength and high
reducibility can lead to savings of the order of 50
kg of coke per ton of crude iron in the blast furnace
process, corresponding to a total energy demand of
about 375 kWh per ton of crude steel. This is within
the currently foreseeable development, the capability
of agglomeration methods.

In nothern mining centres such as the Lake Superior

r eg ion , Canada and Scandinavia, freezing causes
difficulties with transportation of concentrates in
wintertime. This had led to the strong current trend
towards pelletization at the mill of the concentrates
to sintered pellets of low basicity, which gives good
resistance during transportation. In those cases where
the problem of freezing can be overcome, it is other-
wise more economical in terms of both expense and
energy to do the agglomeration at the steelworks, as
there is a great deal of iron-rich dust and other
return material there which can advantageously be
included in unit pellets manufactured at the blast
furnace. These pellets can be given optimum properties
with regard to slag basicity and reduction behaviour,
and the cheaper fuel available at the steelworks can
be utilised. It pays to take an integrated view when
planning the supply of raw material to steelworks.

Exploitation of low-grade base metal ores

In the iron ore example just quoted, more than 50 %

of the volume of the crude ore was removed in the
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form of gangue tailings and a concentrate was pro-

duced with a magnetite grade of about 90% by mass. In
the case of base metals, the degree of concentration
at the mineral processing stage is much higher than
that. If for example we have a lead ore with a 4% Pb
grade and concentrate it to 78% Pb, this means that
we rerove 97% of the ore by volume. This is accomplished
by an extremely efficient flotation process. In fact
the ability to remove this gangue by a cheap, low-
energy flotation process and thereby avoid the need
to smelt large masses of gangue in expensive pyre-
metallurgical processes is the reason why such
extremely poor ores can be exploited at all. An out-
line example of the energy-consuming operations in
the production of lead from such a low-grade ore
mined on a large scale underground might well be as
shown in Table III. Here the conversion factor is
27 l/2.

The example shows that the mining and mineral

technology part of the production process accounts
for nearly 40 percent of the total energy demand of
lead production, which demonstrates the value of a
careful examination of the costs and energy require-
ments for treating such low-grade ores. Due to the
large conversion factor from crude ore to metal,
mining and mineral dressing has a heavy influence on
the total energy consumption. Savings in the cost of
mineral processing also make it possible to set a
lower cut off grade and thereby increase the size of
potentially exploitable mineral resources. Above all,
however, the fact that it is possible to upgrade the
purity of the concentrate to about 90% galena mineral
with a galena yield of the order of 95% proves what
a superior method of concentration flotation is. If
the concentrate grade were lower, the smelting energy
would be disproportionately greater because so much
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energy would have to be wasted in melting deadrock

to slag.

These conditions can be illustrated even more

strikingly by an example of exploitation of a low-
grade copper ore. In an imaginary copper operation
based on an ore with a grade of 0,5% Cu in the form
of chalcopyrite, the energy consumption profile
might be as shown in Table IV. The ore is obtained
by large-scale open-pit mining and is dressed to a
concentrate grade of 28% Cu by flotation.

The ore-to-metal conversion factor is even higher

here, about 220, and only rigorously rat i onalized
mining and mineral processing techniques make it
economically feasible to exploi t such low-grade ores
at a normal price of copper.

It should be observed that the reason for a lower

number of kWh/ton of treated material in the lead
and copper smelting productions than in smelting of
gangue in steel making is the high sulphur content in
the sulphide concentrates, this being a good fuel as
such in the smelting processes.

In the three energy profiles exemplified here we can

see that removal of gangue and other impurities by
magnetic concentration or flotation can be accomplished
for an energy input of 30 to 100 kWh per ton of gangue,
whereas to separate the gangue from the ore by smelting
would call for an input of the order of 1 500 - 2 000
kWh per ton of gangue.

Mineral-based construction materials

The examples already cited from the field of metal

production indicate that the energy requirements for
the production of construction materials manufactured
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by mineral processing, smelting and working in

metallic form are relatively high . due to the heavy
energy consumption of metallurgical processes.
Mineral technology, however, also comprises more
direct methods of producing construction materials,
based on so called industrial minerals. The most
common of these straight mineral-based materials is
concrete; it consists of ballast fractions which are
hatched to a suitable degree of compaction and then
mixed with Portland cement and water. The energy
requirements for production of ballast material,
cement and concrete are listed in Table V.

Since steel and concrete have entirely different

mechanical strength properties, they are not comparable
in terms of application. Other straight mineral-based
constructioh materials such as brick, ceramics and
glass have properties differing from those of concrete
but much higher specific energy consumptions. Great
efforts are now being made to develop low-energy con-
struction materials with improved properties and
wider fields of application . The compression strength
2
of concrete and bricks is of the order of 5 kN/cm ,
but it now appears possible to reach strengths of
10 to 20 kN/cm 2 by such techniques as low-energy steam
autoclaving instead of sinte r ing and the use of readily
available mineral raw materials. Studies of such
possibilities and research into new straight mineral-
based construction materials with properties differing
from those of conventional materials are opening
interesting vistas, especially with regard to energy
consumption. These studies fall within our new re-
search field of mineralography.
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A few words about the technology of fuel minerals

In the foregoing discussion we have used energy con-

sumption instead of cost as our criterion of economy
and have found that this criterion provides valuable
insights into the question of material supplies in
general and mineral technology in particular. It
has however been clear throughout that energy consump-
tion per se is not a consistent standard on which to
base comparisons. We compare coke, coal, fuel oil,
petrol and gas according to their energy content,
equating one metric ton of oil with 11,6 megawatt-
h o ur s regardles s of the fa c t that di f fer e n t energy
sources have different properties, uses and production
costs.

It should be borne in mind that the various fossil

fuels and uranium are mineral-based materials, and
we can draw an energy consumption profile for the
production of each one of them just as we have already
done for the production of steel, lead, copper and
concrete. Here we have considered only the energy
content, but it is quite obvious that coke, for
example, when used as a reducing agent, represents
a much greater total energy demand than, say, coal
slack, despite the fact that both have much the same
physical energy content. Fossil fuels usually con-
tain a greater or lesser amount of suphur, which does
not appreciably affect their energy content but can
have a significant effect on their admissibility from
the point of view of pollution control. A low-sulphur
fuel thus has a higher potential value. A rewiew of
the production of fuel minerals from the energy
standpoint would therefore be an interesting exercise,
but it lies outside the scope of this paper.
Division of Mineral Processing
Royal Institute of Technology
S- 100 44 Sto ckholm, Sweden
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Table 1. Energy consumption of the principal steps and unit

operations in mineral processing

1. Mining
kWh/ton raw material

Underground mining 20-50

Open-pit mining 5-10

2. Communition of raw material

kWh/ton treated material

Crushing to k 80 15 mm 2-5
Crushing and grinding to k 80 200/{m 5-10
Crushing and grinding to k 80 lOO~m 15-20
Autogenous grinding to k~O lOO~m 20-25
Fine gri~ding to k 80 50rm 20-40
Fine grinding to k 80 25;km 25-60

3. Separation and concentration of raw material

kWh/ton treated material

Gravity concentration 5-15

Magnetic concentration 5-20
Electric concentration 20-40
Sulphide ore flotation 15-25
Oxide ore flotation 10-30
Chemical leaching 30-200
Tailings disposal 2-lOa

4. Product preparation
kWh /ton product

Rough dewatering 1-5

Filtration 5-20
Drying, 5% H2 o 50-100
Drying, 30% H2 o approx 300
Granulation 5-20
Pelletization and cold binding approx 200
Pellet sintering 250-400
Downdraught sintering 400-600
Calcination approx 1 000
Smelting 1 500-2 000

~Wh/ton tailings.
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Table II. Energy consumption in steelmaking

kWh per ton kWh per ton kWh per ton

'
of treated of crude steel of crude steel,
Operation material per operation running total

Mining 25 75 75
CoDI!linution 20 60 135
Magnetic separation
Tailings disposal ;_} 30 165
Pelletization 250 420 585
Transportation 50 85 670
Reduction 2 500 4 200 4 870
Refining 200 250 5 120

Table III. Energy consumption 1n crude lead production

kWh per ton kWh per ton kWh per ton

of treated of crude lead of crude lead,
Operation material per operation running total

Mining 15 415 415

Connninution 15 415 830
Flotation 10 275 1 105
Tailings disposal 5 135 1 240
Filtration and drying 100 135 1 375
Transportation 100 135 1 510
Lead smelting 1 600 2 100 3 610
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Table IV. Energy consumption ~n cathode copper production

kWh per ton

kWh per ton kWh per ton of of cathode
of treated cathode copper copper run-
Operation material per operation ning total

Mining 7 1 550 1 550

COilUilinu tion 15 3 300 4 850

~}
Flotation
2 200 7 050
Tailings disposal
Filtration and drying 100 350 7 400
Transportation 100 350 7 750
Cathode copper
production 1 300 4 500 12 250
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Table V. Energy consumption ~n the production of ballast,

cement and concrete

kWh per ton of kWh per ton of

1. ballast, 1. ballast,
kWh per ton 2. cement, 2. cement
of treated 3. concrete 3. concrete
Operation material per operation running total

1. Ballast
Quarrying 8 10 10
Crushing and
screen~ng 5 10 20
Transportation 30 30 50

2. Cement
Limestone
quarrying 10 15 15
Limestone
grinding 15 23 38
Firing 750 1 120 1 158
Clinker
grinding 50 50 1 208
Transportation 100 100 1 308

3. Concrete
Ballast 50 40 40
Cement 1 308 175 215
Mixing 10 10 225