Mineral R&D Center Discovers Process to Extend Tin Production

MINISTRY OF ENERGY AND MINERAL RESOURCES

PRESS RELEASE

NUMBER: 042.Pers/04/SJI/2021

Date: 31 January 2021

Mineral R&D Center Discovers Process to Extend Tin Production

The R&D Center for Mineral and Coal Technologies (Tekmira) of Indonesian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (EMR) has successfully made a technological breakthrough to extend the production life of PT Timah Tbk for twelve years.

"As a customer of Tekmira, PT Timah has gained full cooperation from Tekmira. The Center was able to answer a big challenge faced by PT Timah in terms of mineral processing, especially that of primary tin ores," Aidil Yuzar, Business Development Division Head of state tin miner PT Timah Tbk. said in a online partnership meeting between Tekmira and PT Timah Tbk. on Wednesday (27/1).

Because alluvial tin reserves, both onshore and offshore, are depleting, Public Service Agency (BLU) Tekmira carried out laboratory-scale tests to optimize tin mining products. The results were then scaled up by PT Timah R&D team for factory scale with a capacity of 400 tons of primary tin ores. The results were satisfactory.

"With the formula and process condition found by Tekmira, we can prove that using a tin content of only 10%, we can produce a primary tin content of up to 60%. The board of directors of PT Timah Tbk has expressed its appreciation for the R&D collaboration between PT Timah Tbk and Tekmira because it offers a solution to the company," Aidil continued.

Aidil said that PT Timah Tbk currently has primary tin potential of over 500,000 tons. If the company can process 40,000 tons of primary tin annually, the production life of PT Timah Tbk will extend by twelve years.

The Tekmira-PT Timah collaboration in primary tin ores extraction started in 2018. It was initially focused on a study on tin extraction process and technologies from primary ores by wet chlorination process. The collaboration was then continued with a study on the techno-economic aspects of primary tin ores processing and preparation of a feasibility study on optimizing the tailings of PT Freeport Indonesia (2019-2020).

Tekmira's Coordinator of Mineral Technologies Processing and Utilization Group, Nuryadi Saleh, are happy with the results.

"We're very happy, Alhamdulillah, thank goodness the production scale results do not deviate from the laboratory-scale ones. In the future, we need to study beneficiation to incrase the iron content in slag so that we can produce a content that meets the grade set by the government for export," Nuryadi concluded. (IY)

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