Clean option: Berkeley Pit water treatment and resource recovery strategy

Abstract

The US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Technology Development, established the Resource Recovery Project (RRP) in 1992 as a five-year effort to evaluate and demonstrate multiple technologies for recovering water, metals, and other industrial resources from contaminated surface and groundwater. Natural water resources located throughout the DOE complex and the and western states have been rendered unusable because of contamination from heavy metals. The Berkeley Pit, a large, inactive, open pit copper mine located in Butte, Montana, along with its associated groundwater system, has been selected by the RRP for use as a feedstock for a test bed facility located there. The test bed facility provides the infrastructure needed to evaluate promising technologies at the pilot plant scale. Data obtained from testing these technologies was used to assess their applicability for similar mine drainage water applications throughout the western states and at DOE. The objective of the Clean Option project is to develop strategies that provides a comprehensive and integrated approach to resource recovery using the Berkeley Pit water as a feedstock. The strategies not only consider the immediate problem of resource recovery from the contaminated water, but also manage the subsequent treatment of all resulting process streams. The strategies also employ the philosophy of waste minimization to optimize reduction of the waste volume requiring disposal, and the recovery and reuse of processing materials.