Horne Smelter..TABLE OF CONTENTSJun 2000
COPPER DIVISION: Horne Smelter
TEXT SIZE
2000-06-01
Three flags on poles in front of the Horne smelter office building announce the nationality of the visitors to the smelter each day, and they are ever-changing. Customers and vendors are constantly dropping by to see how this unique smelter treats complex concentrate and recycled copper- and precious-metal-bearing materials, or to the check out the world's first installations of the innovative smelter furnaces: the Noranda reactor and the Noranda converter.
A quarter century ago, the Horne copper-gold mine closed in Rouyn-Noranda, northwest Quebec, leaving behind an out-of-date smelter with a small custom feed operation. The Horne smelter today is a very modern, 100%-custom smelter, and is the world's largest processor of precious metals recyclables, with 850 employees.
"Technically we have become world-class in terms of flexibility and being able to treat a wide variety of materials, physically and chemically," says Mario Chapados, general manager of the smelter. The innovative technologies that have allowed this are concentrate injection (introduced in 1991) and continuous smelting in the Noranda reactor (started up in 1973). The acid plant (built in 1989) and the Noranda converter (commissioned in 1998) have caused big environmental gains.
Feed and Function
The Horne smelter has a base annual feed of 400,000 tonnes of "green concentrate" (low impurity levels). This is drawn mainly from the Louvicourt Cu-Zn-Au mine and other base metal producers in northwest Quebec as well as imported feeds from Europe and elsewhere. The recycling business provides about 100,000 tonnes of the feed, but a larger amount of the value because of its precious metal content. About 350,000 tonnes comes from complex mine concentrates, ores and reverts.
Senior metallurgist Yves Prévost gave CMJ a tour of the operations in April.
There have been many changes to Horne this decade, including the retirement of all the reverberatory furnaces. Most of the feed is routed through the $30-million Noranda reactor, which was built to handle 800 tonnes but now receives 3,200 tonnes of material per day. The reactor has three main advantages: very high energy efficiency, the ability to handle a great variety of feed compositions and physical characteristics, and a high level of precious metal recovery.
Digger144