Wednesday, 21st September 2005 (4222 views)

Mintek has announced that it might help to set up a gold catalyst plant, reports Bloomberg.

Paul Jordan, the company's chief executive, announced that Mintek have produced the catalyst at a laboratory and now need to manufacture it on a larger scale.

"We are working with a major European company that I can't identify yet on a large gold catalyst plant that we hope will be operating by 2007," Mr Jourdan said whilst being interviewed at a Cape Town mining conference.

When in nanoclusters, gold can be used as a catalyst to convert carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, explained Mr Jourdan.

The company has previously been working along with AngloGold Ashanti and Gold Fields and Harmony on project AuTEK, which enabled it to produce kilogram-sized quantities of gold catalysts.

Gold catalysts have taken a while to be developed as AuTEK project manager Elma van der Lingen commented earlier this year: "The production methods used are completely different from those currently employed when producing other precious metal catalysts."

Gold catalysts can be used in air purifiers to remove carbon dioxide, they can also be used to aid the catalytic combustion of hydrocarbons and the oxidative removal of mercury.

 

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