By Erica Apeatua Addo
Tarkwa (W/R), Nov. 18, GNA – Professor Richard Kwasi Amankwah, Vice Chancellor of the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa has assured Ghanaians that his institution and Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF) will soon clean turbid water bodies in the country.
“I’m fronting that process, and I have proof of concept that it is a real thing, and if given the opportunity, I believe UMaT with support from MIIF, can go ahead and clean the turbid waters that we have around us,” he stated
Addressing stakeholders during the Mining for Development forum in Tarkwa, Prof. Amankwah praised UMaT, saying since the ban on small scale mining to date, a total of 5,000 small scale miners had been trained.
He said to revamp the small-scale mining sector required a little bit of education, engagement, engineering, and most of all attitudinal change not only on the side of the miners, but also on all the people who benefitted from it.
In terms of new processes, the Vice Chancellor mentioned that occasionally they develop little and low things for the small-scale miners to apply and one of them had to do with the three-pond purification technique, which Minerals Commission had adopted.
Explaining how it worked, he said, “if the small-scale scale miner is working by a stream or a river, instead of washing the waste directly into the river, you just must dig about three ponds on your concession, wash your material from your trammel into one pond.
Allow it to flow through the guard to the second by the time it gets to the third pond, this water will be clean enough for you to use for your operation, so if you are working by a stream or river, the only contact you have with the river has to do with fetching your initial water from it into your pond to start the operation.
Prof. Amankwah noted that Minerals Commission has championed the method and some small-scale miners had adopted it, adding, “but I don’t think that percentage will be more than 10. About 90% of them are still washing directly into the streams.”
He recalled UMaT came up with the process of direct smelting, where, instead of adding mercury to the final concentrate, the small-scale miners could dry and smelt it directly.
It’s able to recover more than what mercury does, because when you are using mercury, after picking the gold particles with mercury, you squeeze it through a handkerchief, and all the particles of gold that are finer than the openings in the handkerchief will be lost.
Apart from that, the Vice Chancellor stated that when they have sulphite as part of their concentrate, the mercury would not be able to pick gold inside solvents, but the direct melting method was able to do that because of the preheating that goes on.
“In terms of cost, it is cheaper than applying mercury, but what small scale miners tell us over the years is that it is disturbing the supply chain process, and therefore they cannot see why they have taken money from a sponsor, who wants me to sell to him or her gold that has not been purified.
So, when I get my balls, I sell them to the sponsor at a cheap price. If I use direct smell, it means that I am going to sell to you purified gold he won’t like it, and therefore, because of the disruption of the supply chain, many people still don’t want to use it,” he explained
Prof Amankwah continued, people who have embraced the direct smelting process were those running the programme themselves and the gold belonged to them.
GNA