Manganese Woodstock NB
This is an essay about the manganese project in the Woodstock New Brunswick area.
There is a company formed to develop claims between Jacksonville and Benton New Brunswick and proceeding across the border down as far as the State of Maine community called Smyrna Mills. Woodstock Project | Canadian Manganese
Starting in the Woodstock area there’s an intention to blast and crush rock in a primary and secondary crusher. Then to run that smaller material through a ball mill which is a large cylinder slowly spinning two- or 3-inch steal balls to pulverize the crushed material further.
In powder form the material will be trucked to Houlton Maine and sent by train for further processing. The ore will be approximately 3% manganese coming out of the Woodstock facility.
It will be sent to a froth flotation facility adding the powder to a tank of water and chemicals like surfactants (soap). A propeller in the bottom of the tank and forced air will make bubbles. Manganese coats the bubbles. The manganese rich froth will be paddled into a collector and dried. The concentrated material will be approximately 40% manganese.
The next stage is electrolysis similar to copper plating a key. Electricity is sent through a liquid to attract manganese to an anode. At this stage the manganese will be 99% pure.
I’m throwing around a lot of percentages here. One interesting number, by weight about 99% of the material sent to the processing facilities becomes waste or tailings.
Manganese has a wide variety of metallurgy uses and is an alternate to lithium for electric vehicle batteries.
Once the ore is depleted at the local site we enter the reclamation stage. To prevent natural acid from leaching out of the exposed rock from mining operations and flowing into surrounding water ways, spraying Hydra seed covers the rock to stop acidic oxidization. Oxidization lowers PH level to where the water is uninhabitable for fish, liming the water runoff and water testing in perpetuity are common practices.
Hydra seed cannot stick to a sheer rock. Contouring quarry walls to make the terrain feasible for hydra seed is expensive.
The acidic water could leech for 100 or 1000 years creating yellow dogs in streams you can see from space. There is an acronym for this; Mining Acid Damage, MAD. Some jurisdictions require a bond left in escrow prior to breaking ground to ensure there are financial resources to do the reclamation work at the end of the useful life of the manganese operation.
The literature I read appears to be posturing for a public offering. I assume that some money will be used for purchasing the crushers. rolling mills and loaders. And some will be used for a deposit on the reclamation bond.
With a funded reclamation plan and following the ISO 14001 2015 enviromental standard I am in favor of this project. https://www.imsm.com/ca/iso-14001/
