TAIWAN-BASED Philippines Xin Ye Industry Ltd. said it is set to build a second ore-stripping facility in the Philippines.
The company has initially set aside P20 million for the project.
Several mining companies expressed interest in adopting the low-cost, environment-friendly technology it offers.
A subsidiary of Taiwan Xinye Precious Metal Technology Co. Ltd., the firm locally patented a cyanide-free gold stripping method called GP-860, which is expected to see its first commercial run next year after the completion of its facility in Valenzuela.
The technology is ideal for both large- and small-scale gold mining and could help address environmental problems caused by the unregulated use of mercury by small-scale miners.
Xin Ye Executive Vice President Steven Liao told reporters during a news conference in Quezon City last Friday that the process yielded an average extraction rate at over 98 percent of the gold in the ore.
“This entire ore-to-gold process takes a maximum of eight hours. It is also environmentally friendly, nontoxic, harmless, has high efficiency and high productivity,” Liao said.
The technology does not make use of cyanide or mercury, among other toxic chemicals.
This compares with the two- to nearly eight-day dissolution period in the traditional extraction process, which involves the use of the banned chemical mercury, widely used by small-scale miners in the Philippines who produce about 70 percent of the country’s annual gold production.
Xin Ye expects to commercially operate with the GP-860 process upon the completion of its plant in Valenzuela next month.
He said they are now discussing the outlook for a second facility, with its construction expected in full swing next year.
“[We’ll] also put one in Baguio with a small- scale mining company. It’s a big cooperative,” Liao said, noting the plant may cost “a little higher” with the addition of a machine that was not installed in its Valenzuela facility.
A large-scale gold company has contacted Xin Ye requesting more details on the GP-860 process, Liao said, but the executive declined to name the firm with talks still at an early stage.
Aside from gold stripping, the company has made new progress in nickel leaching.
The company developed environmentally friendly nickel-leaching technology that takes only two hours to extract nickel from laterite ores and the nickel recovery rate exceeds 80 percent.
The technology with the current process takes about eight hours and results in a 40-percent recovery rate.
After a series of experiments, a large number of rare earth elements and radioactive elements were detected in the reacted laterite ores, all of which are important raw materials used in the high-tech, defense and energy industries, Lian said. “Our solution does not cost too much.”
He added even nickel companies can reduce cost and make their operations more profitable using their technology.
At present, the Philippines has only two operational processing plants, namely the Coral Bay and Taganito processing plants for nickel, in which Nickel Asia Corp., the country’s largest nickel supplier, has a 10-percent equity in each.
Liao said the firm is looking to collaborate with the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, which has tested the firm’s technology, and key universities through production, learning and research cooperation in order to pave the way for Philippine mining to become one of the global leaders in the industry.