Chapter 7 - Iron ore extraction techniques

7 - Iron ore extraction techniques

00/01696 Ca ion-exchanged coal char as H 2S sorbent

Reviewed by: Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847–2006 by Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson Clayton Ruminski Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847–2006. By Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson. (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2011. 351 pp. Cloth $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8143-3511-6.) Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson’s cowritten Iron Will is an excellent example of business and industrial history, a relatively narrow field of study. Sanctioned as a company history by the last remaining independent iron-mining company now known as Cliffs Natural Resources, the book chronicles “Cleveland Cliffs’ rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century, its struggle to survive the consolidation of the steel industry . . . , the shift from a labor intensive to a capital-intensive business . . . , and the company’s recent transition to a global iron merchant” (3). Despite the authors’ stringent focus upon the company itself, they also succeed in showing the importance the mining of iron ore in the Great Lakes region had on the Midwest and the subsequent development of the iron and steel industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a professor of history at Michigan Technological University, Reynolds has published several essays on the mining of iron ore in the Great Lakes region and the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, while Dawson, president of History Enterprises, Inc., based in Cleveland, has authored several institutional histories. Included within the authors’ chronological narrative of Cleveland-Cliffs are a number of themes that embrace management, fear of mineral depletion, the cyclical nature of the iron and steel industry, and labor and technology (4). Throughout the book, these themes are well examined, particularly the company’s focus on iron-mining technology and its evolution, such as its transition to greater mechanized open-pit operations and underground mining in the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the depletion of high-grade ores, and the development of taconite pellets in the 1950s. In addition to the mining of iron ore, Dawson and Reynolds also focus on the company’s product diversification throughout various economic crises. Of particular interest is the company’s decision to go into the charcoal iron-smelting business during the depression years of the 1890s by utilizing Michigan’s vast woodlands for fuel for their blast furnaces and by exploiting its by-products, such as wood alcohol and acetone. By the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland-Cliffs used partnerships to leverage capital resources, as well as investment in other companies, in order to ensure a market for their ore, one such example of the latter being the construction of a large blast furnace in Warren, Ohio, known as the Trumbull-Cliffs Furnace Co., a joint venture between Cleveland-Cliffs and the Trumbull Steel Co. Supplementing the authors’ extensive and detailed narrative is the use of a vast amount of primary sources, including internal reports and correspondence from the company, as well as daybooks and interviews with company personnel. Their sources, which include more than one hundred illustrations, provide a detailed exploration of the company’s history and deliver a unique glimpse [End Page 139] into one of the country’s most important raw-material providers. Despite its sanctioning by Cliffs Natural Resources, the authors successfully removed many of the downfalls that often accompany such a project, including discernible bias within the text and oversight of unscrupulous company labor relations and practice; however, removing all bias is a daunting task. Those interested in mining technology, iron and steel, business, economic, regional and industrial history will find Iron Will both an informative and important addition to the field. Both Dawson and Reynolds present a well-researched economic and industrial history of a company so essential to the Midwest’s industrial prowess throughout the twentieth century, yet with the expanding global economy, Cliffs Natural Resources is currently presented with similar challenges that had plagued them throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clayton Ruminski Youngstown State University Copyright © 2014 The Kent State University Press

The main types of accidents in 6–10 kV power supply systems of mining enterprises are considered, such as short circuits, single-phase earth faults, phase failures, with their percentage relationships established. Mining enterprises are divided into three groups: open-cut mining enterprises (quarries and open coal pits); enterprises for extraction of minerals by underground method (underground coal and ore mines); mining & processing enterprises (concentrating factories, alumina plants, fertilizer production enterprises). The analysis of the accident rate of power supply systems of mining enterprises carried out for the period from 1995 to 2015 makes it possible to trace the dynamics of the above types of accidents and determine their most common form — single-phase earth fault. Over the above period, in the 6 – 10 kV power supply systems of quarries and open coal pits, underground coal and ore mines, and mining & processing enterprises, the share of single-phase earth faults was found to be within the following ranges: 65 – 76%; 60 – 69%; 58 – 67%, respectively. The greatest increase in accidents during the period under review was observed in 6 –10 kV power supply systems of quarries and open coal pits; with the total accident rate having risen with a factor of 3.21 from 1995 to 2015. The accident rate growth factor for underground coal and ore mines, and mining & processing enterprises amounted to 2.06 and 2.72, respectively. The changes are shown in specifi c types of accidents and general accident rate in the systems of electricity supply to quarries and open pits, underground coal and ore mines, and mining & processing enterprises. It is established that in the 6 – 10 kV power supply systems of the above-mentioned mining enterprises, the changes in single-phase earth faults and general accident rate are described by linear equations. On the basis of established patterns, a forecast is made of the change in the accident rates in power supply systems of the mining enterprises under consideration up to the years 2020 ÷ 2025.

20 - Life cycle assessment of iron ore mining and processing

Chapter 20 - Life cycle assessment of iron ore mining and processing

In Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847--2006, Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson tell the story of Cleveland-Cliffs, the only surviving independent American iron mining company, now known as Cliffs Natural Resources. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland-Cliffs played a major role in the opening and development of the Lake Superior mining district and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Through Cleveland-Cliffs' history, Reynolds and Dawson examine major transitions in the history of the American iron and steel industry from the perspective of an important raw materials supplier.Reynolds and Dawson trace Cleveland-Cliffs' beginnings around 1850, its growth under Samuel L. Mather and his son William G. Mather, its emergence as an important player in the growing national iron ore market, and its tribulations during the Great Depression. The authors explore the company's fortunes after World War II, when Cleveland-Cliffs developed technologies to tap into vast reserves of low-grade Michigan iron ore and turned to joint ventures and strategic partnerships to raise the capital needed to implement them. The authors also explain how the company became the largest independent producer of iron ore in the United States by purchasing the mining interests of its bankrupt partners during the implosion of the American steel industry in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Reynolds and Dawson detail Cleveland-Cliffs' evolving efforts to deal with labor, from its early mostly immigrant workforce to its ambitious program of welfare capitalism in the early twentieth century to its struggles with organized labor after World War II. Iron Will is a thorough, well-organized history based on extensive archival research and interviews with company personnel. This story will appeal to scholars interested in industrial or mining history, business historians, and those interested in Great Lakes and Michigan history.

With the depleting reserves of high-grade iron ore in the world, froth flotation has become increasingly important to process intermediate- and low-grade iron ore in an attempt to meet the rapidly growing demand on the international market. In over half a century's practice in the iron ore industry, froth flotation has been established as an efficient method to remove impurities fro m iron ore. In this chapter, the industrial practice and fundamental research activities of iron ore flotation are reviewed. The latest innovations in iron ore flotation at major iron ore operations around the world are introduced. The development of flotation routes fro m direct an ionic flotation to reverse cationic flotation, and the rising of reverse anionic flotation in China in recent years is discussed. Although direct anionic flotation was the first flotation route employed in the iron ore industry, it was later largely replaced by the more efficient reverse cationic flotation route. The application of reverse anionic flotation in Ch ina in recent years effectively overcomes some flaws of reverse cationic flotation such as high reagent cost and high metal loss in desliming. The reagents used in iron ore flotation, including starch, amines and fatty acids, and the mechanisms of their interactions with the minerals in iron ore are examined. The p resence of some specific impurities other than quartz in iron ore, such as alu mina containing minerals, i.e. kaolinite and gibbsite, and phosphorous, is detrimental and attracts penalties. The removal of these specific impurit ies has received increasing attention in the iron ore industry. The industrial pract ice and latest research activities in this area are closely reviewed.

When the Rio Tinto mining company decided to increase its output of iron ore by 25% in its Marandoo location, it had to deal with an unexpected problem: an excess of water in the deep reaches of the mine. Because freshwater is a scarce resource in this region of Australia, Rio Tinto's challenge was to come up with a comprehensive water strategy for the region. This case is used in Darden's Economics of course elective. Excerpt UVA-GEM-0130 Rev. Aug. 17, 2016 Rio Tinto's Ore Mining: Making Hay from Water When contemplating Rio Tinto's phase-two plans for the Marandoo mine in Western Australia, one could only be reminded of Tom Albanese, former CEO of Rio Tinto, and his outspoken view that for Rio Tinto, water was a strategic issue and first and foremost an enabler for mining. In one of the driest places on Earth, the second-largest iron ore producer was grappling with a major water problem: an excess of water. In an aggressive effort to increase output and ride the wave of China's appetite for raw materials, Rio Tinto had chosen, among others, the Marandoo mine in remote Pilbara to increase its overall capacity to 360 million tons, up from 290million tons (see Exhibit 1). Considering the ever-decreasing amount of readily accessible iron ore, Rio Tinto wanted to drill deeper and was aiming for the vast stores of ore underneath the water table, which were often hundreds of meters below the earth's surface. The ambitious undertaking came, however, with particular challenges. Being able to operate the mine under such circumstances meant being able to dispose of the surplus water, a process often referred to as dewatering. It was an open question whether Rio Tinto was developing a template for iron ore mining in the 21st century by its approach to the Marandoo expansion project. The Changing Mining Landscape The mining industry had been booming in Australia and elsewhere since early 2000. Commodity prices were rising higher and for a more extended period of time than during the previous boom period of the 1970s. Rapid growth in Asia and especially in China was driving demand for commodities, particularly in steel and energy generation. The landscape was very different from that of the lackluster 1980s and 1990s with Japan's “lost decade” and the Asian Financial Crisis. The rise in commodity prices this time was accompanied by a shift in resources toward mining, which triggered a large increase in the real exchange rate of the Australian dollar. The latter challenged the competitiveness of both the export- and import-competing industries, to such an extent that some economists started talking about “Dutch Disease” in the context of Australia. Rio Tinto expected continued strong fundamentals, especially in iron ore demand, despite some slowdown in Chinese economic growth (see Exhibit2). . . .

The work considers conditions of deep levels of the Underground Mine Group for underground ore mining (as underground mines) of the Mining Department of the PJSC “ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih” (the PJSC “ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih”). The research aims to improve indicators of mined ore mass extraction when mining rich iron ores through studying and optimizing consumption of explosives, enhancing mining technology to provide fulfilment of the underground iron ore mining program. During the research, there are analyzed mining geological and technical conditions of the deposit mining as well as current technologies of iron ore mining at the Underground Mine Group of the PJSC “ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih”. The work analyzes the achieved indices and consumption of explosives for drilling and blasting at the Underground Mine Group. The mining geological and technical conditions of the deposit mining as well as current technologies of mining, parameters of preparatory operations, the nomenclature and qualitative characteristics of many types of explosives are determined to have changed. This complicates planning consumption of explosives and making their estimates for work sites. However, this is a reason for selecting highly efficient technology and machinery in deteriorating mining and geological conditions of operating at over 1200 m depths. The work determines dependencies of a stress value on a mining depth and physical properties of rocks, as well as parameters of drilling and blasting operations considering the stress-strain state of the massif under high rock pressure at deep levels of the Mining Group of the PJSC “ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih”.

ObjectivesAn excess of mesothelioma has been found in iron ore miners in northeastern Minnesota. Miners of taconite, the current form of ore mined, face a number of potentially hazardous exposures....

Introduction: Importance to Australia of the full development of its meagre water resources Nature has provided Australia with an abundance of mineral and other resources. It was the discovery of gold in the middle of the 19th century which proved to be one of the major factors in the country’s early economic development and population growth. More recently mining of iron ore, nickel, lead-zinc, copper, manganese, uranium and other minerals has provided even greater stimulus to the growth of its economic strength. During the last two decades, particularly, explorations have revealed further deposits of rich iron ore and bauxite in vast quantities. During the 1960s hundreds of kilometres of railways have been constructed, some at world record breaking speeds, to bring iron ore from the recently discovered deposits in virtually uninhabited areas to newly constructed ports on the western coast of the continent for export, mainly to Japan which has established itself as a major market for Australian minerals. Ten years ago Australia’s iron ore reserves were estimated at 368 million tons. Today they are believed to be over 20000 million tons. Bauxite reserves are estimated at 3750 million tons.

In many mineral processing applications it is necessary to know the isoelectric points of the various minerals in the ore to properly perform flotation and other mineral separations. However, current zeta potential analysis technology used to determine the isoelectric point of a particle suspension cannot deliver the isoelectric point of each individual mineral, just an average of the mineral system. Traditionally, individual isoelectric points have been gathered by testing pure, synthetic minerals. These values can vary widely depending on the mineral synthesis procedure and the water quality used during the isoelectric point analysis. A more robust approach for determining the actual isoelectric point of a particular mineral in a mixture of minerals is needed. This paper details a method for determining the isoelectric point of an iron oxide mineral in a siliceous iron ore. The method uses a laser scattering particle size analyzer and a pH electrode to determine the pH at which the liberated mineral particles begin to flocculate as pH is decreased. The pH at which the average particle size rises dramatically is the isoelectric point of the mineral with the highest isoelectric point in the ore. This measurement technique was used on natural hematite, goethite and siderite ores as well as a synthetic mixture of pure silica and pure hematite. The results for synthetic hematite mixtures were comparable to literature values.

Purpose. The purpose of the study is to conduct an environmental assessment of the state of the atmospheric air during iron ore mining using TNT-containing and emulsion explosives (EE). The methodology of research. To determine the features of dispersion in the atmosphere of environmentally hazardous substances at different distances from the air pit of an iron ore mine, an analytical method for calculating the distribution of concentrations of harmful substances formed after blasting operations during underground iron ore mining was used. Using environmental analysis, the level of reduction in environmental hazard when using EE in blasting operations compared to TNT-containing analogues was determined. Findings. Based on the calculation of the values of ground level concentration of environmentally hazardous substances, it was established that the maximum concentration of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide was observed in 2008, when 100% of TNT-containing explosives (E) were used in underground mining operations. The use of 78% of Ukrainit-type EE and 22% of TNT-containing E from their total costs during 2020, compared to 2008, made it possible to reduce the maximum concentrations of environmentally hazardous substances: carbon monoxide – by 5.0–5.5 times, and nitrogen oxide and dioxide – by 1.2–1.3 times. The originality. Consists in establishing the dependence of a decrease in ground level concentration of environmentally hazardous substances and a decrease in the environmental hazard index by an average of 1.5 times (up to 36%), when using Ukrainit-type EE in the mines of the Zaporizhzhya Iron Ore Plant Private Joint-Stock Company (ZIOP PJSC) compared to the use of TNT-containing E. Practical implications. It has been established that the use of Ukrainit type E in underground ore mining leads to a decrease in the concentrations of environmentally hazardous substances such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and dioxide formed after blasting operations, as well as a decrease in the technogenic load on the atmospheric air.

The purpose of this work is to establish the disadvantages and advantages of existing foreign and domestic technological developments for the maintenance of workings in iron ore and uranium mines and to determine the most promising ways to increase their reliability.The analysis of the existing technological developments for the maintenance of uranium and iron ore deposits workings made it possible to establish a variety of options for increasing the operational reliability of potentially dangerous areas. Taking into account these results and the peculiarities of the mining and geological conditions of deposits of iron and uranium ores in Ukraine, studies of the stability of mining workings with the application of various technological solutions have been carried out. As a result of the conducted research, it was proposed: - the use of a rod support based on slag-silicate fast-hardening cartridge mixtures, consisting of a metal rod, a rubber sealing plug and cartridges with fast-hardening mixtures. - the use of contour (smooth-wall) blasting technology during tunneling, which reduces the dynamic impact of blasting on the rock massif and the formation of additional fracture in its near-contour zone. It has been established that in difficult mining and geological conditions, protection of workings should be carried out by combined methods. At the same time, both supports affecting the massif in the near-contour zone of the workings and special supports for specific conditions are used. The general scheme of implementation of such methods is given. Thus, the experience of maintaining workings in difficult mining and geological conditions during underground mining of ore deposits showed the need to continue researching the patterns of deformation and destruction of unstable rocks and creating new technological solutions and supports to solve the problem of maintaining workings and increasing the duration and safety of their operation. The choice of supports for maintenance of workings in specific mining and geological conditions is determined, first of all, by the reliability factor. At the same time, using the existing developments, successfully tested in the underground mining of iron ore, as well as coal and non-mineral raw materials, which allow to increase the reliability and safety of the works, it is necessary to find out the possibility of their application also in the working of uranium mines. Keywords: uranium and iron ore deposits, stability of workings, technological solutions, fastening of workings, support.