value of zinc process, page-25

Stealing some more time, lets see if I can make that last heavily technical mouthfull a little more sensible for this forum.

Looking at the Steel Industry and ignoring Zinc for the minute the EARS/DRI developed thus:

The EARS/ DRI process will take spent acid and convert it back into Fresh Acid valued at about $300/tonne plus an Iron oxide waste. This didn't excite the steel industry until APG took it a step further and made the Iron Oxide back into Iron (much more valuable).

Then APG worked out if it added lots of rust into the spent acid before it was converted back to acid they could make lots more IRON. This is where the Baghouse Dust and Mill scale came from, it's basicaly rust and fines accumulated in the steelmaking process.

The recipe went: Take 1 tonne of spent liquor, add two tonne of Rust (Baghouse dust and mill scale) and after processing you get 1 tonne of Acid and 1.6 tonne of Iron pellets. The value of the combined amount is about $700 ($300 for acid and $400 for 1.6 tonne of iron) the cost would be about $130 and this process would give a profit of $570 per tonne of spent liquor generated.

Where the Baghouse dust came from an EAF or was highly contaminated with Zinc it was destined to be buried rather than converted to Iron (which was still profitable as other disposal techniques were a lot more expensive).

The big change is APG thinks it can make and separate out Zinc metal. So (my speculation as they havent said this specifically in the announcement, but inferred it) is they could source spent pickle from the galvanising industry and add high zinz EAF dust.

Using the same basis as the DRI the recipe is 1 tonne of pickle plus 2 tonne of EAF dust would produce 1 tonne of Acid ($300) and 400 kg Zinc metal (AUD$1,365 at spot prices) giving a value of $1,665 per tonne of pickle. Using the cost of $130 per tonne the profit is $1,535 at current zinc prices.

Why 400 kg Zinc Metal? EAF is 50% Zinc Oxide and that makes 40% Zinc metal. So 2 Tonnes of EAF dust makes 400kg of Zinc metal.

A $6 million DRZ plant on that basis would make $29,600,000 in a year compared to the $11,000,000 the EARS/DRI plant they have already costed. This is because the DRZ profit is 2.7 times bigger than the DRI profit (rough calcs)

This depends on finding as much Galvanising pickle and EAF dust as the projected EARS/DRI plant.

Note: these are back of the envelope figures calculated from what APG has published and still needs the new plant up and running to prove the technology.

Cheers

Seik

Hmmmm, that wasn't that much less technical...sorry, but at least I didn't throw chemical equations at you this time :)