Environmental Consideration for Emerging Copper Winning Processes

摘要

Fourteen processes for the production of copper were examined to evaluate their potential environmental impact, economics and energy requirements relative to reverberatory smelting as commonly practices in the U.S. Because of limitations in data available for more recent process developments, detailed evaluations were completed for only four smelting processes: electric (two scenarios), Noranda (three scenarios), flash two scenarios each of the Outokumpo and INCO systems), and reverberatory (five scenarios). A computer program, developed by the Bureau under an independent effort was used to provide the estimates from published data.