English

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, MSE Technology Applications has conducted several notable technology demonstrations of biologically based technologies to treat acid rock drainage (ARD). These projects have progressively evolved under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Mine Waste Technology Program (MWTP) and have resulted in significant advances in the development of bioreactor application of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) technology. In this paper, summary information from four separate demonstration projects will be presented for the purpose of providing overviews of the bioreactor design parameters and the operation and development of each bioreactor system. Test methods and data analysis information for each project is not fully provided within this paper, as it is available from other sources. Summarized treatment results will be presented in this paper for three field-demonstrations. Additionally, results of one laboratory design project will be presented. A different bioreactor configuration was employed for each of the four projects. The first design to be presented will be an in situ bioreactor. This configuration was installed within the flooded subsurface workings of the Lilly Orphan Boy Mine in Montana and was operated between 1994 and 2005. The second design to be presented will be a set of on-site SRB bioreactors that were configured in parallel at the Calliope Mine in Montana. These test bioreactors allowed various operational attributes to be evaluated including lime pretreatment and temperature. The configuration of the third design to be presented will be a set of both anaerobic and aerobic bioreactors in staged fashion at the Surething Mine in Montana. This bioreactor design has been in operation since 2001 and shows the comprehensive applicability for biological treatment of ARD. The focus of the last project to be presented will be an investigative approach to bioreactor design. This resulted in a proposed bioreactor configuration to effectively treat ARD by reducing dissolved sulfate and heavy metals concentrations. In general, MWTP results from these four bioreactor configurations show that SRB bioreactors are effective for passive ARD treatment. ______________________ 1 Paper presented at the 7 th International Conference on Acid Rock Drainage (ICARD), March 26-30, 2006, St. Louis MO. R.I. Barnhisel (ed.) Published by the American Society of Mining and Reclamation (ASMR), 3134 Montavesta Road, Lexington, KY 40502 2 Suzzann Nordwick, Senior Engineer; Marek Zaluski, Staff Engineer; and Brian Park, Senior Engineer, MSE Technology Applications, Inc., Mike Mansfield Advanced Technology Center, 200 Technology Way, P.O. Box 4078, Butte, Montana 59702, USA, and Diana Bless, United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Risk Management Research Laboratory, 26 West Martin Luther King Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45268, USA 7 th International Conference on Acid Rock Drainage, 2006 pp 1410-1420 DOI: 10.21000/JASMR06021410