Carbonate filler resources of the Bjelopavlici area, Montenegro

Darko Bozovic,Filip Abramovic,Dragan Radulovic,Slobodan Radusinovic,Vladimir Simic

doi:10.2298/hemind150325054b

Abstract

Carbonate filler is an important mineral commodity, with rather diverse industrial applications. The Bjelopavlici area in Montenegro is rich in chemically pure limestone, which was preliminary explored in the field, and further on mineralogical, petrographic, geochemical and technological properties were studied. The obtained results have proven the high quality of limestone from the studied deposits, as it can be used for paints&varnishes, rubber&plastics, metallurgy, foundry, sugar, fertilizers and animal feed industry. Several deposits have very pure limestone, that can be also used for paper, glass, pharmacy and soil neutralisation. The potential resources of high quality limestone are around 23 million tons.

Highlights

Carbonate filler is an important mineral commodity, with rather diverse industrial applications
The total amount of impurities is rather low as seen from geochemistry of stone (Tables 2 and 3) as well as X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) analyses (Fig. 4)
The first complex study of potential limestone resources for filler grade quality was performed on twelwe deposits in the Bjelopavlići area in Montenegro

Summary

Introduction

Carbonate filler is an important mineral commodity, with rather diverse industrial applications. The carbonate resources of the Bjelopavlići area (Fig. 1) comprise dimension (decorative) stone, aggregate rock, and filler grade carbonate. Their unique feature is that all those industrial types of stone are made of extremely pure limestone, which means that all fully and/or partially explored and analysed deposits can be used as source of filler, even for very demanding markets. One aggregate rock quarry named Sađavac was explored All these deposits were preliminary explored in the last five years as potential source of calcium-carbonate filler [1,2,3,4], including several new occurrences: Lalevići, Pješivački do and Mali Garač. High quality Senonian limestone is underlain by Turonian limestone and dolomite, and overlain by Paleogene flysch of the Zeta valley, comprised of marlstone, shale and sandstone with lenses and layers of breccia and conglomerate [6]

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Conclusion