Recovery of nickel from falcondo tailings

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Over 1.1 million metric tonnes  of primary nickel was produced around the world in 2001. Primary nickel is mainly used in alloying with other metals for the production of corrosion resistant materials. In 2001, 65% of the world production of primary nickel was consumed in the manufacturing of stainless steel.  Falcondo (Falconbridge Dominicana, C. por A.), located in Dominican Republic, has a production capacity of 30,000 metric tonnes of nickel. At Falcondo, limonite feed is extracted from the rest of the ore by low-impact crushing and screening.  The rejected material is referred to as 'tailings'.  The tailings, which are not suitable for smelting in Falcondo's electric shaft reduction furnace, contain about 1 wt% of Ni. Falcondo produces about 2400 metric tonnes of tailings daily meaning that about 24 metric tonnes of Ni is not recovered from the mining operation and rejected each day.  With a medium term LME price of primary nickel of US$11,000 per metric tonne, the nickel in the tailings rejected each day is worth US$264,000.  Assuming 350 operating days per year and a recovery of 85 %, the potential revenue that could be generated by recovering the nickel in the tailings would be over US$79,000,000 per year. The present proposal aims to identify the best means to recover the nickel lost to the tailings and to elaborate on the technical feasibility and possible challenges of a potential commercial process.It requires a thorough understanding of the available literature, a comprehensive analysis and characterization of the anticipated feed materials, a thermodynamic analysis of the potential process chemistries and a series of experimental trials to verify the technical feasibility of the identified process options.  Some speculative exploratory tests pursuing previously untried process options will also be undertaken.