Yava Technologies Inc. has developed a high-tech, environmentally friendly, mineral recovery process that has the potential to raise the global mining and mineral processing industries to much higher levels of efficiency and environmental friendliness.
Yava’s technology eliminates the need for traditional mining equipment such as concentrators and smelters along with the enormous costs and pollution that result from their use and yet is designed to produce high profit, value added products for a variety of industries.
Overview
A proprietary, low cost, environmentally friendly and award winning solution mining technology has been developed by Yava Technologies Inc. (Yava). The process recovers minerals as high purity, value added industrial products from high or low grade ore deposits, mine discharge, tailings and contaminated mine sites (Yava Process). The Yava Process eliminates the cost and pollution generated from traditional mining equipment such as smelters and yet is designed to produce high profit, value added products for a variety of industries. The technology is the result of almost a decade of intensive research and development that was undertaken at a cost of approximately $9.5 million in cash and services. After an extensive technical review, a department of CANMET indicated it was the cleanest and most energy efficient system they had seen and recommended it be deployed internationally on mine tailings. Yava intends to licence, partner, as well as develop its own deposits. Yava currently holds the rights to one patent and has applied for three additional provisional patents on the process.
The Technology – Pollution Free Mining
The Yava Process is designed to recover minerals from a porous medium such as its lead, zinc, calcium and manganese sandstone deposit in Nova Scotia, mine sludge, or many of the hundreds of tailing deposits that exist world wide. Many of these deposits contain hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in metal that is unrecoverable with current technologies. Because of its low operating and capital costs, the Yava Process has the potential to convert numerous tailing deposits from environmental liabilities into major assets.
Yava’s process is a modification of low-cost in situ leach mining (ISLM) that for decades has used specially tailored leach solutions to recover uranium and other minerals from porous deposits. The process eliminates many conventional mining costs such as transportation of ore and its concentration and processing. Yava’s process is a closed loop that involves injecting a unique leachant into the targeted material via a grid of wells that form a wellfield. As the fluids are pumped through the mineralized zone, they dissolve the mineralization and are subsequently pumped to the treatment plant for on site processing. Yava’s proprietary process expands the number of minerals recoverable using ISLM and converts those minerals to high purity, value added products. One such product under development is lithiated manganese dioxide (LMD) which is in demand for use in the manufacture of batteries for computers, cell phones, electric vehicles, etc. Yava recently entered into a preliminary agreement with a Fortune 500 company that is interested in marketing its LMD on a global scale.