Re: Sounds a tad pointless?
Heap-leaching works on very large piles of waste rock to recover low concentrations of minerals economically. That is, you just pile up the rock in huge piles on a packed clay or plastic leach pad, spray the leach solution on it, and recover the water draining off the bottom. The recovered water will contain dissolved minerals which you then recover and process further to extract the desired minerals.
The process is already widely used in the mining industry for copper, gold, and other minerals. The main difficult is that if the leaching agent is an environmental hazard then you have a big problem when (if) it leaks out to somewhere else.
The process proposed here uses an organic acid which will naturally decay, meaning that leaks are less of a problem, making the mining process less risky.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
