DuPont gives UNR major gift in form of mining technology patent

SCOTT SONNER

Wednesday, Aug. 18, 1999 | 11:49 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - DuPont Co. has awarded patent rights worth millions of dollars to the University of Nevada, Reno, to develop a new technology scientists say could prove instrumental in combating contamination at mines.

The chemical treatment still in its developmental stages helps prevent acid run-off at hard rock mines, one of the most severe environmental problems facing rivers and streams in remote areas of the West, according to researchers at Nevada's Mackay School of Mines.

"This is a new tool in the arsenal that has the potential to be very significant in the prevention of a problem that's in the order of billions of dollars a year," said Glen Miller, director of the university's Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering.

"It is one of the major environmental problems worldwide whether you ask regulatory agencies, environmentalists or the mining industry," he said today.

Known as "passivation," the technology involves spraying a chemical coating on rocks in polluted rivers and streams to seal in the acid and prevent it from desolving in the water.

"It is very simple. Elegantly simple. We are quite excited about it," Miller said.

Randolph Guschl, DuPont's director of technology transfer at corporate headquarters in Wilmington, Del., said the remediation technique will require additional research and development "before they become commercially viable."

But he said DuPont was confident that would happen.

UNR President Joe Crowley said DuPont chose the university largely because of the work of Miller and Manoranjan Misra, the chairman of an engineering division at the Mackay School of Mines who already has three patents dealing with wastewater treatment and control of acid mine drainage.

School officials said the agreement with DuPont prohibits them from disclosing the specific estimated value of the patents. But Miller said it was in the millions of dollars.

Over time, the patent has the potential to be one of the largest gifts to UNR ever, school spokesman Greg Bortolin said.

"We think it is potentially large business," Ken Hunter, university vice president for research, confirmed today.

"In many cases, 50 percent of a mining operations costs go into remeditation," Hunter said.

"If we can help solve that problem, I would agree we would probably be able to parlay this into millions of dollars for the university."

Several sites throughout the West, including in Nevada, likely will benefit from the new technology, Miller said.

Most of the North American mining operations with acid run-off problems involve older mines with acid heaps in Montana, Idaho and Canada, he said. The acid results from the use of chemicals to remove gold and other metals from the ore.

"Once an acid generation starts, they don't get better by themselves. There are examples in ancient Rome when they opened sites in Great Britain that still generating acidity 2,000 years later," Miller said.

The new technique has the potential to be applied at the Leviathan Mine, an abandoned Sierra sulfur mine proposed as a Superfund site just over the Nevada border near Markleyville, Calif.

The once-underground mine first produced copper sulfate in the 1860s. From the 1950s to early 1960s, open pit mining was used to extract sulfur until the mine was finally shut down in 1962.

"At the Leviathan, it would be decades if not centuries before it is naturally cleaned up," Miller said.