PROMT: Philippines Remediation of Mine Tailings

我们将与菲律宾的研究人员和矿业公司合作，探索管理金属矿山废物、清理污染、使土壤能够支持植物生长并使土地能够重复利用的新方法。为了将气候变化的影响降到最低，低碳技术需要越来越多的金属。菲律宾是世界上第五大矿产资源丰富的国家，将从这种不断增长的需求中受益，但需要可持续的采矿技术，以防止对环境和周围社区产生负面影响。传统的采矿和矿物加工技术消耗大量淡水，产生二氧化碳，可能污染水，并与当地社区争夺资源。它们还会产生大量的矿山废物——不经济的岩石，以及矿物加工过程中留下的细磨矿物的湿浆，即尾矿。这些废料被堆放在建成的水坝后面，作为尾矿储存设施。据估计，菲律宾每年生产约3300万吨尾矿- -大约是大金字塔重量的六倍。运营和关闭矿山的尾矿储存设施都对环境造成危害；失败可能导致污染物质释放，影响人类和生态系统。在菲律宾，由于地形崎岖，降雨量大，地震频繁，失败的风险增加了。我们的研究项目将研究新的可持续技术，以尽量减少矿山尾矿对环境的危害。我们将把我们的研究应用于镍和铜金矿，它们占菲律宾金属矿物开采价值的99%。我们的项目汇集了对创新至关重要的三个科学领域：(1)我们将展示如何实时监测尾矿储存设施，以便对环境变化进行反应性管理；为了实现这一目标，我们将使用新兴的地球物理断层扫描和遥感技术来监测和了解4D尾矿的行为(2)我们将研究新型环保溶剂作为一种新方法，从现代和废弃的尾矿中溶解金属，并测试它们在矿山现场的应用；这将使更多具有经济价值的金属得到回收，并通过净化有害成分有利于尾矿管理。(3)我们将研究植物和微生物如何在矿山废物中定居，这是如何受到溶剂使用的影响，并确定促进生物生长的最佳方法。这不仅可以恢复土地并使其重新用于农业或野生动物，还可以通过提高尾矿的稳定性和降低其毒性来最大限度地减少对环境的危害。虽然这些办法已分别在其他情况下应用，但这将是第一次将它们结合起来使用，以解决尾矿补救的紧迫问题。通过整合这些新颖的方法，我们将发现协同效应，这将在创新方面带来一个阶段性的变化，并使我们能够实现可持续尾矿管理的目标。这项研究的结果、影响和好处将是减少尾矿对当地社区和环境的影响，改善矿业公司经营的社会许可证，减少废弃场地的长期负债和风险，以及通过回收额外金属和土地再利用获得潜在的收入来源。

We will work with researchers and mining companies in the Philippines to discover new ways to manage metal mine wastes, to clean up pollution, and to make soils to support plant growth and allow the land to be reused. More and more metals are needed for the low carbon technologies to minimise the effects of climate change. The Philippines is the fifth most mineral-rich country in the world and will benefit from this increased demand, but sustainable mining technologies are needed to prevent negative impacts on the environment and surrounding communities. Traditional mining and mineral processing technologies consume large quantities of fresh water, produce CO2, can contaminate water, and compete with local communities for resources. They also produce large amounts of mine waste - uneconomic rock, and wet slurries of finely-ground minerals left over from mineral processing, known as tailings. These are deposited behind constructed dams as tailings storage facilities. It is estimated that in the Philippines about 33 million tonnes of tailings are produced annually - about six times the weight of the Great Pyramid. Tailings storage facilities at both operational and closed mines pose environmental hazards; failure could cause contaminated materials to be released affecting people and ecosystems. The risk of failure is increased in the Philippines, due to the rugged topography, high rainfall, and frequent earthquakes.Our research project will investigate new sustainable technologies to minimise the environmental hazards of mine tailings. We will apply our research to both nickel and copper-gold mines which make up 99% of the value of metallic minerals mined in the Philippines. Our project brings together three science areas that are vital for innovation: (1) we will show how tailings storage facilities can be monitored in real time to allow reactive management to environmental changes; to achieve this we will use emerging technology in geophysical tomography and remote sensing to monitor and understand tailings behaviour in 4D (2) we will investigate novel environmentally-benign solvents as a new method to dissolve metals from modern and abandoned tailings and test their application at mine sites; this will allow more metals to be recovered with economic value and also benefit tailings management by decontaminating hazardous components (3) we will study how plants and microbes colonise mine wastes, how this is affected by the use of solvents, and identify the best ways to promote biological growth. This will not only rehabilitate the land and allow it to be reused for agriculture or wildlife, it also minimises environmental hazards by improving the stability of the tailings and decreasing their toxicity.Whilst these approaches have been applied separately in other settings, this will be the first time that they have been used in combination to address the pressing issue of tailings remediation. By integrating these novel approaches we will find synergies that will deliver a step-change in innovation and enable us to achieve our ambition of sustainable tailings management. The outcomes, impacts and benefits of this research will be to decrease impacts from tailings to local communities and the environment, improved social license to operate for mining companies, reduced long term liabilities and risks from abandoned sites, and potential sources of revenue by recovery of additional metals and land re-use.