New lease on life for cobalt: refining, milling, assaying and bulk sampling capacity creates critical mass.

• Author: Tollinsky, Norm
• Position: MINING

Proclaiming the rebirth of Cobalt, one of Ontario's earliest mining camps, may be a stretch, but the recent reopening of the Yukon Refinery just north of town is a step in the right direction.

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The refinery had been in mothballs for 13 of the preceding 15 years when United Commodity AG of Switzerland purchased it in June 2012. It has since added a Merrill-Crowe process for gold and silver recovery and struck some long-term deals for processing concentrate.

Originally a silver mill, Cobatec purchased and converted it to a recovery plant for tailings in the early '90s, recalled plant supervisor Gunner Skillins.

"That didn't work too well, so we went into feed from a smelter stack in Cuba containing both cobalt and nickel."

That, too, proved short-lived. The plant shut down and was purchased in the late '90s by Canmine Resources, which operated it for a few years before going bankrupt. Ownership devolved to the bondholders represented by a Swiss financial group, which kept it on care and maintenance while trying to sell it for 10 years.

Approximately 46 employees are currently working at the refinery and an expansion is planned for later this year.

The refinery is specially equipped and licensed to process are containing arsenic, which it is able to render inert by heating it in an autoclave to form ferrous arsenide.

"In the absence of this plant, a lot of the material would just end up sitting in piles," said Skillins, a graduate of the Haileybury School of Mines who worked at the plant in the early '90s and came out of retirement to help fellow Haileybury grad and plant manager Michael De Carlo get it going again.

Most processing facilities in Canada and the United States won't accept the material, "but this way, we can clean up the environment and make some money at the same time," said Skillins.

With the addition of the Merrill-Crowe process, the refinery is able to produce nickel, cobalt, silver and gold from otherwise difficult to process concentrate.

The refinery has the capacity to process 12 tonnes of material a day, but United Commodity president Reto Hartmann says he hopes to double capacity by the end of this year.

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"The purpose of the facility is to process material from the old mines and to make money from it. We're right in the Cobalt camp, which has a lot of feed available and we have the technology to do it.

"We have had a very warm welcome from the local government people," noted...