NGMX is South Australian engineering company with the exclusive license for the innovative metal recovery technology. The technology, developed and patented by InnovEco Australia, is used to process low-grade oxide ores, mine tailings and mineral wastes. This technology aligns with the South Australia’s Copper Strategy through higher metal recovery, lower reagent and water consumption. It is increasing the metal output from the resources and reducing operating and environmental costs. The technology could also make small copper deposits economically viable, reprocess old tailings dams and solve some legacy mine rehabilitation issues.
Adelaide’s NGMX is commercialising the innovative proprietary metal recovery technology developed by local company InnovEco Australia.
The patented technology includes two processes - resin in pulp (RIP) and resin in moist mix (RIMM). These processes have been specifically developed to recover valuable metals from low grade ores, fine minerals and wastes such as tailings and effluents.
The technology is based on continues ion exchange process. In comparison with the traditional hydrometallurgical methods, such as heap and vat leaching, the RIMM process is characterised by:
lower consumption of water and chemicals
smaller footprint
shorter residence time.
In combination with higher metal recovery rates these features may provide significant advantages from the point of view of environmental impact, including water and energy savings.
The RIMM process can also be used to remove harmful substances from water and soils for their ecological cleaning and minimisation of the environmental impact. One of the main ideas of using this technology is to reprocess wastes to partially finance the mine site rehabilitation and closure.
It’s been successfully tested for economic recovery of copper and other metals from complex and low-grade ores, mining and industrial waste.
The technology can be used for the effective extraction of mining by-products, such as recovering metals from old leaching pads, mine and process water. It also can improve technical and economic parameters of the existing smelters, refineries and hydrometallurgical plants by increasing metal extraction rate by 10- to 20%, extracting by-products and removing impurities.
The novel technology provides other advantages:
Use of modern selective ion exchange resin
Simple process flow diagram
Possibility to process fines and clays in a simple and cost-effective way
Significant reduction in water and reagents consumption
Low residual content in the wastes
NGMX’s commercialisation program uses both resin in pulp (RIP) and Resin In Moist Mix (RIMM) process.
It follows the following processing steps:
Blending fine metal-bearing minerals, leaching solution and ion exchange resins
Separating the resin from solids
Resin desorption to produce pure and concentrated metal sulphate solution
Producing final product - copper sulphate crystals or cathode copper
So far, NGMX has built and is operating two RIP mini pilot plants (laboratory scale) in Australia and Chile.
A proof-of-process RIMM plant prototype (~20 kg/h) has been built and is operating in a continuous process using South Australian copper oxide ore. The technology has shown high copper recovery (90%-95%) for Cu oxide minerals.
The company has presented four research papers at the Copper 2013, Alta 2016 and Alta 2019 conferences.
NGMX will also participate in mines close and environmental projects by removing toxic and dangerous components from soil, air and industrial wastewater.