About

BRGM has worked on the bioleaching of sulfidic mine tailings for four decades. That work has run from early laboratory studies to industrial operation at the Kasese Cobalt Company in Uganda, where BRGM developed the process used to recover cobalt from a pyritic tailings stockpile in continuous stirred-tank reactors, and more recently to the Low-Duty Bioreactor (LDB), a pond-based configuration developed through successive European projects including BIOMINE, PROMINE and NEMO. The LDB will now be taken to demonstration on copper-cobalt flotation tailings at Nkana-Mindola, Kitwe, Zambia, under the Horizon Europe MUKUBA project, which began in June 2026. The presentation sets out what four decades of this work has taught us, and what it has not. It will cover reactor and inoculum design, the behaviour of real tailings as a feed material, and the operational and downstream constraints that govern whether a bioleaching route is viable at industrial scale. Central to this is the question of when bioleaching is an appropriate choice, and when it is not. Both objectives will be considered: recovery of contained metals, and oxidative removal of reactive sulfides for stabilisation. The presentation closes on the open questions that remain. A good deal remains to be done, but the direction of travel is now reasonably clear.

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