Technical Aspects of Some Foreign Passive Treatment Cases for the Remediation of Mine Drainage

Abstract

Recently the treatment of mine drainage, especially acid mine drainage (AMD) is attracting a lot of attention, including the passive treatment that is a cost-effective and energy efficient process. In such a process, the natural geochemical reaction, gravitational flow, bacteria metabolism, etc, are utilized for the active treatment, enabling continuous addition of chemical reagents and maintenance of mechanical facilities, and so on. For a long time, the development of the passive treatment was mainly carried out in North America and Europa, thus, much useful knowledge is cultivated and many experimental and actual sites are operated in these area. In this paper, the useful knowledge, information and instances related to the passive treatment are reviewed. The performance of sulfate reducing bacteria (SRB) is very important for the treatment of the mine drainage from non-ferrous mine sites. Thus, the matters related with SRB, that is, the reaction, the reactor and the operation are also described in detail.

Keywords

• passive treatment
• mine drainage
• acid mine drainage (amd)
• sulfate reducing bacteria (srb)
• metal ion