Rebirth of the Mining Tycoon

Chapter 37: The Pilot Plant

Hao Zhengzhi suspected the young man was bluffing, trying to provoke a reaction to draw attention to himself.

He looked at Lü Fengnian. "You brought him here—what do you think?"

Lü Fengnian found himself caught between two sides: on one hand, his research partner Hao Zhengzhi, and on the other, Zhao Hepu and the Wukuang delegation, whom he had personally invited.

To be honest, he had no idea whether Wukuang Group really had any advanced bioleaching technology.

"Well…" he hesitated.

"Since we're already here," Li Tang interjected, seeing the tension and wanting to redirect the conversation, "and since Director Hao is busy with the pilot plant, why don't we take this opportunity to visit it? We've come all the way from Yanjing—asking to see the plant isn't too much, is it?"

Hao hesitated for a moment, but then nodded. "Alright."

"Do you have a printer here?" Li Tang asked before leaving.

"Yes, in the printing room."

Under the guidance of a staff member, Li Tang printed out part of the material he had compiled previously.

Zise Mining's copper-gold mine was located some distance away from the county town, up in the mountains. The research institute arranged several off-road vehicles to take everyone up.

The pilot plant sat within the mine's industrial zone. The facility covered a large area, although there weren't many buildings—most of the space was used for storing experimental materials like oxygen tanks, leaching agents, and other supplies.

"This is the Zise Copper-Gold Mine," Hao said after stepping out of the car. As they walked through the pilot plant, he explained, "Zise Mining is named after this mine. Why 'Zise'—'purple'? If you came here in spring, you'd understand. The hills bloom with tiny purple flowers—absolutely beautiful."

Once inside the plant, Lü Fengnian and Zheng Chengxian changed into standardized research uniforms.

Outside, spread out before them, were large, flat areas arranged like rice paddies. But instead of green fields, there were neatly laid layers of crushed rock, resembling road construction.

Workers moved around the site with handheld sprayers, dousing the rocks as though applying pesticides to a field.

There were no automated sprinkler systems—just manual labor. It was a very rudimentary stage of development.

After a few moments of observation, Li Tang already had a rough understanding of the project's status.

Their research into bioleaching was still in its infancy.

The so-called pilot plant wasn't yet operating at scale.

"You seemed pretty stressed earlier. Is something wrong with the plant?" Lü asked, stepping into his role as a fellow researcher.

"At Heap Site No. 5, we're running trials with moderate thermophilic bacteria. The spray interval was set at ten days on, five days off. It's been a month, and recently we've observed that leaching efficiency has dropped below 40%. The pH readings haven't changed much either," Hao said with a deep frown as they approached Heap No. 5. "This suggests the test here has failed—but we don't yet know why."

In science, failure is normal. What matters is identifying the cause and adjusting accordingly.

"No idea yet whether the problem is with the bacteria or the ore particle size?" Lü asked, voicing some possible causes.

"It's not the ore size," Hao replied, turning to point at another site. "At Heap No. 6, we used ore particles under 20 millimeters as well. And its early leaching rate surpassed 50%. The longer it runs, the slower the leaching, but we estimate it will eventually exceed 70%."

"We'll need time to figure this out," Lü concluded.

Both researchers recognized the problem but couldn't yet explain it. More diagnostics were required.

All around Heap No. 5, technicians in uniform scribbled notes on clipboards.

Failure was expected. The important part was documenting it thoroughly, learning from it, and adjusting course.

Li Tang crouched to pick up a chunk of ore, turning it over in his hands as he listened to the researchers' conversation.

When the conversation lulled, he casually remarked, "Your copper ore here is mostly vein-type. That means the bacteria can easily infiltrate along cracks and break down the metal content."

He tossed the rock aside and clapped the dust from his hands.

"There's really no need to crush the ore so finely. It's wasted effort."

Zhao Hepu didn't fully understand the technical details of bioleaching, but having visited Jiujiang Copper's plant, he could immediately spot some key differences.

Most notably, the ore size and heap height here were very different.

At Jiujiang, the ore was largely uncrushed—huge chunks, and the heaps towered over a hundred meters high.

Here, the ore was all finely crushed, having gone through several rounds of processing. The heaps were only about twenty meters tall—standing on the edge didn't make you dizzy at all.

He couldn't say which method was better, but the difference was clear.

"We're running different trials at different heap sites," Hao said, pointing toward other areas. "Some heaps use even finer ore; others use coarser chunks."

Following his finger, they could see variations in the different heaps—some looked like towering altars, others like low walls barely off the ground.

To the untrained eye, it might all look like rubble. But Li Tang could see what they were testing.

Different ore sizes, heap heights, leaching agent concentrations, spray intervals, bacterial strains—all variables in a massive experiment.

The goal of the research was to identify the most efficient and cost-effective combination.

And that would take a lot of trials.

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