Birch Mountain Resources to Recover Precious Metals from Suncor Energy Oil Sands Waste Stream

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Birch Mountain Resources Limited (TSX-V:BMD) (Calgary, Alberta) has signed an agreement with Suncor Energy Incorporated (NYSE:SU) (Calgary, Alberta) which grants them the exclusive right to extract and recover precious metals from the froth treatment tailings at Suncor's oil sands mine located close to Fort McMurray, Alberta. Suncor produces close to 8,000 tons a day of froth treatment tailings, which is a waste product of the oil sands mining and bitumen extraction process.

Birch Mountain Resources is currently conducting research and technology development as well as bench scale process work to determine the feasibility of building a plant to recover gold, platinum, and palladium nanoparticles in commercial amounts from the process tailings. Birch Mountain has filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a process for extracting and recovering metal nanoparticles.

If proven feasible, Birch Mountain will tap a 12" froth treatment tailings pipeline from Suncor's plant, which delivers the tailings to the waste tailings ponds on Suncor's property. Birch Mountain will build a precious metals recovery plant, which will most likely include large batch processing and holding vessels as well as metal stripping processes and classifiers. The company may also be able to recover residual bitumen, which was not recovered in the froth treatment process. This recovered bitumen would be transferred back to Suncor. The remaining waste would be piped back to Suncor's tailings ponds.

Birch Mountain is also developing a limestone quarry to supply limestone and aggregate to Athabasca area oil sands producers.