:: European BIOSHALE Project Looks for a Sustainable Way of Exploiting Black Shale Ores Using Biotechnologies

BIOSHALE is a specific targeted research project co-funded by the European Commission (FP6 programme), which aims at developing biotechnology for a safe, clean and viable exploitation of black shale ores for metal production and at designing an innovative model of development of mining activities.

The main milestones of the project are the following:

• Evaluation of the geological resources (geological modelling);
• Selection of metal-bearing components & biological consortia to be tested;
• Assessment of bioprocessing methods and determination of complementary hydrometallurgical processing routes for metals recovery;
• Risk assessment relative to wastes management of the new processing routes;
• Techno-economic evaluation of new processes from mining to metal recovery including social and environmental impacts.

The innovations should have a long-term impact on the mining industry with regard to the challenge of creating knowledge-based industries.

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