Hello Peter,

Hope you're doing well, I'm sure you guys are all very busy with everything going on these days at Pyro.

UncleRon brought up a great point on another forum, and just wanted to relay this to you.

There is today, a massive amount of copper slag in the market, and as deposits dwindle, larger volumes of material are required to be mined to extract sufficient percentages of the copper, creating more slag than ever before, in my understanding.

Aluminum value is roughly $1920 US/tn where as copper is approx $6245 US/tn

Q. Is it possible, and economically viable, to utilise the Drosrite furnace to seperate the cobalt and iron to recover the copper from the slag?

Dear CNDNBACON,

You bring up an interesting point and one that needs some clarification.

First, the basic question is does Drosrite have applicability to copper?

Short answer is we think so…but not with slag, or at least that is our first impression (we have been wrong in the past.  We grossly underestimated the potential for Dross in processing Aluminum Dross for example).

So, if not slag then what?  There is something called copper Dross which is sometimes confused with copper slag/tailings.

I found the following explanation of the differences, on the web, which  I share with you:

Dross and Slag:  Both are waste or byproducts of smelting and metallurgy, but Dross is finer than slag.

Slag is the crude material shed by high-grade ore during smelting, and it remains behind when the metal is poured off in a molten state. Tailings are cruder still and are the rock and trash material separated from crude ore during the fining process-- including matter separated in the preliminary process, where crushing is employed, and no heat is applied. Heated low-grade ore also leads tailings, but sometimes the word "slag" is applied to this as well, especially after it is hauled out and dumped-- "slag heap" and "tailings dump" are synonymous terms, but this is strictly true only because slag is dumped with the tailings. In the non-mining-industry population, this fact has led to a blurring of the distinction.

Dross tends to be lighter than the metal being processed and can be part of the late stages of smelting or more advanced metallurgy, dealing with alloys. It is skimmed when possible, but sometimes it must be physically chipped and wire-brushed from the top surfaces of ingots during the cooling process.

So slag is confused with tailings, which are the rocky matrix ore is contained in, and are lighter than ore. It is the waste product of smelting ore, but low-grade ore yields crude metal which requires further smelting. Dross is a byproduct of metal (sometimes a useful raw product) and is therefore sometimes the result of smelting, sometimes refining.

Two more things add to the confusion. Dross can be heavier than the metal being processed (especially in the case of aluminum), and the type that is useless is also destined for the slag heap. The word itself is kind of "old world" or related to precious metallurgy, and in the U.S. anyway, slag can be a catchall term that includes dross.

As such, Copper slag contains very small amounts of copper, typically less than 1%.  This is in sharp contrast with aluminum and zinc dross which can contain 50% or more pure metal.  At first glance, due to the small amount of copper in the slag, we do not believe that Drosrite can be an economically viable alternative to the recovery of copper from slag, but then again, we could be wrong.

Copper dross by contrast could be a potential application for DROSRITE.  Copper dross comes from two main sources: copper casting houses and lead smelters.  We are still investing this income stream (along with other metal dross’).  We have yet to find a credible source that would help define market size.  As you can see this is still a work in process.

Hope that helps,

Sincerely,

Peter