“San Juan: promueven nueva tecnología para aprovechar desechos mineros,” published in “El inversor energético & minero – Newsletter diario” (City of Buenos Aires) on 12/22/2010

The possibility of small microorganisms eating rocks and separating minerals in order to use them, sounds innovative and cutting edge. However, biological leaching is a mechanism that was used before Christ was born, to separate necessary minerals for the life of man in abandoned mines. This is applied to those mines that have finished the usual exploitation mode. It is an ecological process that is growing year after year, but requires investment and support for stable use. And in the Province of San Juan it does not have its correlation yet. “Today, according to international calculations, for every 100 tons of minerals, at least 1 is obtained by biological leaching,” told to Diario de Cuyo Juan Manuel Sánchez Yáñez, a full time research professor and member of the Environmental Microbiology Laboratory of the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, in Mexico. In the province of San Juan, there are no records of biological leaching use in any exploitation, according to information from the local Mining Secretariat. “There is no type of biological leaching project presented in the province. Nor do I think that it will be applied in the short term, due to the fact that biological leaching generally applies to copper waste, and in the province the large deposits of this mineral have not been developed yet,” explained Juan Bustamente, Provincial Mining Director. Generally, the process of Biological Leaching is recommended for those mines that have concluded traditional exploitation, when what is left of the deposit is less than 10 grams per ton of metal.