This N.B. Startup Wants To Make Gold Mining More Environmentally Friendly
MONCTON – Gold mining has led people to remote places around the world for a long time, but the industry hasn’t been known for its environmentally friendly practices. Moncton startup Kasis Environmental is hoping to change that with a product that it says could replace cyanide in the process of gold leaching.
The company is patenting what it calls KCell (formerly CyoCell), a bio-derived fibre that gold clings to.
Co-founder Travis Osmond won’t go into details about the material, but says it is naturally-derived, non-toxic and includes “a couple of food-grade ingredients.”
“It’s entirely new. We combined some very interesting natural products and made something new,” he said.
The discovery happened back when Osmond was still a chemistry student at Mount Allison University. In a project led by Andrew Grant, an associate professor of chemistry at the university, the research team that includes Osmond created a material that had an affinity for metals.
Grant and Osmond founded Kasis in July 2015. Osmond says this was possible because at Mount Allison, the lead researcher owns the intellectual property generated from the research, allowing Grant to transfer that to the company.
In the beginning, they thought the material they made could help clean up waste in the mining industry, which includes various toxic metals and are often stored in underground backfills or tailings ponds, and some, dumped into bodies of water. But when the cost analysis showed it would be a bit more expensive for companies to use their material for clean up, they turned to the gold leaching process.
The material, which Kasis has continued to improve over the years and now calls KCell, picks up gold better than it picked up any other metals. That means, even if there were other metals in a solution, the fibre picks up only the gold.
“And it does that really quickly. Faster than anything else that we know of and anything else that the testing agencies we’ve used know about,” Osmond said.
Nearly all the gold produced today are produced with the help of cyanide. Gold mining companies use it to extract the gold from low-grade ore.
The cyanide ends up in tailings that, in turn, often end up in oceans, rivers and lakes. A 2012 report by Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada, and studies going back to 1991, show cyanide and other toxic metals in mine waste – the industry calls this “effluent” – end up killing large amounts of wildlife in various countries.
In April this year, Canada’s environmental commissioner published a report noting the negative impact of mining effluent, including from gold mining, on the country’s fish, their habitat, and the biodiversity of bugs in those areas.
Scientists around the world have tried to come up with solutions to this, and there were discoveries like the ability of a cornstarch-based material to leach gold, for example. But so far, cyanide still reigns.
Osmond is convinced KCell is the answer. He says KCell is cost-effective and won’t end with the loss of wildlife or water pollution.
“We’ve had third-party hydrometallurgical testing done and our stuff seems to work the way we’ve been expecting it to,” he said.
With the help of the team at the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), Kasis was able to make advancements with its product development. KCell can not only extract gold, but the gold can also be separated from it.
Kasis is now working with an industry-trusted company in Quebec to create a process in which the material can be used by engineering firms that design gold mining operations, Osmond said.
“We’ve come to figure out that although there are end users [of cyanide], the people we need to convince are the engineering firms – the SNC Lavalins of the world – to use our stuff and implement it on their designs,” he said. “They design all the facilities that get put on the land.”
The company gets its funding from various sources. The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation contributed research funds in the beginning. Funding also came from Grant’s research coffers, NRC IRAP, as well as Grant and Osmond’s own pockets, among others.
It doesn’t have any large venture capital firm or angel investor behind it yet, “but we will need some very soon,” Osmond says.
Kasis plans to release a market-ready package of its product early next year.