In a fitting location half a mile from the mouth of the Ohio River on the banks of Monongahela River, the first ever Mine Water Treatment Technology Conference was held last week at Pittsburgh’s Station Square.

Over 260 people from 3 countries and 17 states attended the four day event where the latest advances in mine water treatment technologies were presented.

Passive treatment pioneer Bob Kleinmann from the U.S. Department of Energy set the stage in his keynote address as he put the current state of the art in the perspective of just how far the field has advanced from its birth in the 1980’s.

The federal Office of Surface Mining’s Brent Means paralleled Kleinmann’s presentation by characterizing the growth of expenditures in publicly-funded mine water mitigation projects using passive treatment. An amazing $64 million has been spent on over 200 projects since 1992 in Pennsylvania alone.

In what appears to be a growing and important trend in mine water treatment, a number of presentations were made where advances in understanding the microbiology of mine water may be exploited. For example, sulfate reducing bacteria are being used in bioreactors to remove heavy metals and neutralize acids in polluted mine water at locations on several continents.

Those same sulfate reducing “bugs” may someday allow in situ treatment where mine water is actually treated in the old mine workings using waste products to feed the bugs as they perform their chemical magic. Various types of bacteria may also promote the removal of a variety of harmful metals from mine polluted water.

Several novel approaches to removing iron, the most common metal pollutant in mine water, were presented. Each in its own way provided optimizations improving performance and/or reducing the costs of treatment.

Related to iron removal were presentations dealing specifically with the production of waste iron sludges, a by-product of treatment systems. Methods that reduce sludge volumes, a very important factor in lowering the cost of operations of treatment facilities, were discussed.

Other ways of optimizing performance of treatment systems were also explored. For instance, an understanding of how limestone dissolves can lead to treatment systems that make the most of this inexpensive material in neutralizing acids.

Understanding failure modes of treatment systems as well as ways of designing systems to avoid failures were presented. One presentation offered design optimization strategies for flushing residues that would otherwise lead to system failure.

An entire day of the conference was devoted to a relatively new subject in mine water treatment: resource recovery, i.e. the proverbial making lemonade from lemons.

Bob Hedin, the godfather of resource recovery, discussed how some iron sludges are valuable as a source of paint pigments. In fact, Environoxide, his company’s family of pigments derived from iron sludge, has won a 2003 Top 10 GreenSpec award for excellence as an environmental building product.

Other uses of treatment system sludges are being developed that may eventually help in paying for treatment costs, or maybe even turning a profit. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of applications using sludge and turning them into value added products.

· A corrosion inhibitor for iron reinforcing bars for use in concrete;

· Self-lubricating pressed metal bearings;

· Additives to Portland cement improving its physical properties and appearance;

· Raw feed material for use in blast furnaces in making iron and steel; and

· A product preventing phosphorus losses from agricultural lands into waterways.

One presentation discussed harnessing the power of flowing water of abandoned mine discharges using small scale electric generation equipment.

In addition to presentations by nationally known experts, the conference also included a heavily attended one-day workshop on passive treatment design. The most current design principles and in-depth look at mine water chemistry were emphasized.

The conference also heard from Congressman John E. Peterson, (R-5th District) who talked about his efforts to accelerate clean-up the historic problems caused by abandoned coal mines.

His introduction of HB 2721 would reauthorize the ability to collect fees on every ton of coal mined in the United States. Unless Congress acts, that authority will expire on June 30, 2006, which in turn would cut off one of the most important sources of funding for reclaiming lands and waters damaged by old mining practices.

Additionally Peterson’s legislation would strategically direct more funding to areas having the most abandoned mine problems, while limiting spending on non-abandoned mine related problems. While vowing to work for a solution good for Pennsylvania, the Congressman noted the existence of powerful interests having competing notions on how funding should best be spent. To move forward, he acknowledged some compromise will need to occur.

The conference was a joint effort among many organizations. The federal Office of Surface Mining, having a mandate to provide technology transfer, joined with the coalition that organizes Pennsylvania’s annual conference on abandoned mine reclamation and with the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy which had sponsored several symposiums on resource recovery.

Organizations playing roles in producing the conference included the Department of Environmental Protection, both the Eastern and Western PA Coalitions for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, Western Pennsylvania Watershed Program, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and the Kiski Basin Initiatives.

Because of the success of this year’s conference, the partners are interested in producing future conferences, perhaps once every several years, while reverting to a traditional Pennsylvania focus in intervening years.

Detailed information on all presentations is available at the Conference website.

Click here to send a letter to your member of Congress supporting HR 2721.

(Contributed by Bruce Golden, Regional Coordinator, Western PA Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation)

8/26/2005