Mineracao

American-Eurasian Journal of Agronomy 2 (2): 84-88, 2009
ISSN 1995-896X
© IDOSI Publications, 2009

Biomining - A Useful Approach Toward Metal Extraction
1

Mohd. Haris Siddiqui, 2Ashish Kumar, 3Kavindra Kumar Kesari and 1Jamal M. Arif
1

Department of Biotechnology, Integral University, Luck now, India
Department of Biochemical Engineering, Harcourt Butler Technological Institute, Kanpur, India
3
School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

2

Abstract: Biomining is the extraction of specific metals from their ores through biological means usually bacteria. Although it is a new technique used by the mining industry to extract minerals such as copper, uranium and gold from their ores but nowadays biomining occupies an increasingly important place among the available mining technologies. Today biomining is no longer a promising technology but an actual economical alternative for treating specific mineral ores.Traditional extractions involve many expensive steps such as roasting and smelting, which requires sufficient concentrations of elements in ores while low concentrations are not a problem for bacteria because they simply ignore the waste which surrounds the metals, attaining extraction yields of over 90% in some cases.
Key words: Biomining % Microbial decomposition % Pyrite % Lixiviant % Thiobacillus thiooxidans %
Thiobacillus caldus % Leptospirillum ferrooxidans
INTRODUCTION

THE PROCESS

Our ability to harness the natural capability of certain microbes to decompose a variety of mineral deposits is an old process that dates back to Roman times in the first century BC and probably the Phoenicians before that
[1-2]. Those early miners used microbial activity to leach copper from ore without being aware that microbes were involved but now with increasing research trend in mineral biotechnology our interest toward the phenomena has grown up and has given some potential results which
bring