Silica scale mitigation for high recovery reverse osmosis of groundwater for a mining process Original Research Article

The feasibility of silica removal in RO treatment of groundwater from a Western Australian mining and processing operation to prevent scaling and enhance water recovery was investigated. This study has shown that it is possible to decrease the silica concentration in RO concentrate to levels that would allow an overall water recovery of 90% to 95% using 10 g/L of regenerable activated alumina adsorbent. Regeneration of the adsorbent using 2% NaOH was found to be effective for at least three regeneration cycles. A preliminary costing of the high water recovery RO process using silica removal by adsorption indicated product water (permeate) costs of $5.6/kL and savings due to a reduction in brine volume from the current 40% of feed volume to 5–10% of feed volume. It also allows better utilisation of a scarce groundwater resource, allowing the production of up to 1.6 times more low salt water from a given volume of groundwater. These results warrant larger scale investigation of silica removal and adsorbent regeneration for high recovery RO processing for mining operations, and application of silica removal to RO treatment of other silica laden waters such as coal seam gas produced water.