Missed opportunityReally a shame shareholders were not given the chance to vote on pursuing a horizontal selective solution mine, as Karnalytes lease would have been a very suitable test site location with the patented technology. Some of the brightest minds in the potash industry were willing to help Karnalyte, and were snubbed in 2018, when we all coud have been a part of something monumental.
HLD GreenPotash™ is potash produced using the following criteria:
- No fresh water – Do NOT need to use fresh water to build caverns underground for surface area, instead a mining plane is created with over 100,000m² of surface area.
- No tailings on surface – Potash is mined with a NaCl saturated brine so that when it enters the mining plane through the horizontal injection well, Na+ is replaced with K+ and KCl is produced out of the production wells and crystallized out of the saturated brine.
- Small surface footprint and a focus in reduce GHG intensity – process is less energy intensive as brine is heated through geothermal means and other power requirements are
Horizontal Line Drive Selective Solution Mining was adapted from ‘tight oil’ horizontal drilling technology used in the Saskatchewan oil patch. The HLD Mining process drills wells parallel to high-grade potash seams in order to dissolve the potash. The potash brine is then pumped up to the surface, where it is crystallized and shipped to a processing facility in Estevan. Our method maximizes access to surface areas in the richest, high-grade potash seam zones. Injecting mining fluid across multiple points along the horizontal wellbore leads to an even distribution of the fluid over the entire mining plane. This provides a sustainable way to reach inaccessible or distant pockets of potash.
Patent Number 11,073,008minimized through the use of geothermal energy