In situ leach
mining through artificially dissolving minerals in a borehole
In-situ leaching (ISL), also called in-situ recovery (ISR) or solution mining, is a mining process used to recover minerals such as copper and uranium through boreholes drilled into a deposit, in situ. In-situ leach works by artificially dissolving minerals occurring naturally in the solid state.
The process initially involves the drilling of boreholes into the ore deposit. Explosive or hydraulic fracturing can be used to create open pathways in the deposit for the solution to penetrate. Leaching solution is pumped into the deposit where it comes in contact with the ore. The solution bearing the dissolved ore content is then pumped to the surface and processed. This process allows the extraction of metals and salts from an ore body without the need for conventional mining involving drill-and-blast, open-cut or underground mining.
Process
In-situ leach mining involves pumping of a lixiviant into the ore body via a borehole, which circulates through the porous rock dissolving the ore and is extracted via a second borehole.
The lixiviant varies according to the ore deposit: for salt deposits the leachate can be fresh water into which salts can readily dissolve. For copper, acids are generally needed to enhance solubility of the ore minerals within the solution.
“In situ leach” enters the record as mining through artificially dissolving minerals in a borehole. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what situ, leach and mining can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “In situ leach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.