PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat model to evaluate water-quality effects from passive and active treatment of mine drainage

Presenters

Chuck Cra­votta | Research Hydro­lo­gist, USGS Pennsylvania Water Sci­ence Cen­ter cravottageochemical@gmail.com
Brent Means | Hydro­lo­gist, OSMRE Pitt­s­burgh Field Office bmeans@osmre.gov
Brad Shultz | Min­ing Engin­eer, OSMRE Pitt­s­burgh Field Office bshultz@osmre.gov

Agenda

10:00	Over­view of AMDTreat 6.0 Beta cost-ana­lys­is soft­ware (Power­Point)
11:00	Over­view of AMDTreat 6.0 Beta cost-ana­lys­is soft­ware (Power Point)
12:00	Box lunch provided to registered par­ti­cipants
13:00	Live demon­stra­tions of cor­res­pond­ing cost and water-qual­ity mod­els for example pass­ive and act­ive treat­ment sys­tems
14:00	Break
14:20	Live demon­stra­tions of cor­res­pond­ing cost and water-qual­ity mod­els for example pass­ive and act­ive treat­ment sys­tems
15:30	Hands-on par­ti­cipant tri­als for provided case stud­ies or their own AMD case
16:00	Group Ques­tions & Answers and Adjourn

Abstract

AMDTreat 6.0 Beta (2022) is a newly updated com­puter applic­a­tion for estim­at­ing costs and siz­ing facil­it­ies to abate acid mine drain­age (AMD) through the applic­a­tion of pass­ive or act­ive treat­ment tech­no­lo­gies. The soft­ware has com­pre­hens­ive cost-ana­lys­is mod­ules for pass­ive sys­tems, includ­ing ver­tic­al flow ponds, oxic or anox­ic lime­stone drains, man­ganese remov­al beds, aer­obic or anaer­obic wet­lands, and biore­act­ors, plus act­ive sys­tems, includ­ing caustic soda, soda ash, lime products, hydro­gen per­ox­ide, per­man­gan­ate, poly­mer, and ancil­lary com­pon­ents such as decar­bon­a­tion (aer­a­tion), con­vey­ance chan­nels, ponds, and cla­ri­fi­ers. The soft­ware provides over 400 user-modi­fi­able vari­ables for excav­a­tion, con­struc­tion, reve­get­a­tion, pip­ing, road con­struc­tion, land acquis­i­tion, sys­tem main­ten­ance, labor, water sampling, design, sur­vey­ing, pump­ing, sludge remov­al, chem­ic­al con­sump­tion, and oth­er func­tions. The default cost data can be mod­i­fied to adjust for infla­tion or site-spe­cif­ic require­ments. AMDTreat 6.0 also con­tains sev­er­al fin­an­cial and sci­entif­ic tools to help select and plan treat­ment sys­tems. These tools include a long-term fin­an­cial fore­cast­ing mod­ule, an acid­ity cal­cu­lat­or, a sulfate reduc­tion cal­cu­lat­or, a Lan­geli­er sat­ur­a­tion index cal­cu­lat­or, a mass-bal­ance cal­cu­lat­or, and iron oxid­a­tion tools, plus an integ­rated ver­sion of the PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat “TreatTrainMix2” water-qual­ity mod­el­ing tool (Cra­votta, 2020, 2021). The integ­rated PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat tool incor­por­ates all the oth­er sci­entif­ic tools into a single pro­gram to eval­u­ate poten­tial changes in pH, dis­solved metals, and asso­ci­ated solute con­cen­tra­tions res­ult­ing through sequen­tial steps of pass­ive and act­ive treat­ment of AMD.

The integ­rated PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat (TreatTrainMix2) tool and stand-alone PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat tool sets (CausticTitration.exe, ParallelTreatment.exe, and TreatTrainMix2.exe) util­ize PHREEQC equi­lib­ri­um (aqueous and sur­face spe­ci­ation) and kin­et­ics mod­els for gas exchange, iron and man­ganese oxid­a­tion and pre­cip­it­a­tion, lime­stone dis­sol­u­tion, and organ­ic car­bon oxid­a­tion com­bined with reduc­tion of nitrate, sulfate, and fer­ric iron. Reac­tions with caustic chem­ic­als (CaO, Ca(OH)₂, NaOH, Na₂CO₃) or oxid­iz­ing agents (H₂O₂) also may be sim­u­lated sep­ar­ately or com­bined with sequen­tial kin­et­ic steps. A user inter­face for each stand-alone tool facil­it­ates input of water chem­istry and flow data for one or two influ­ent solu­tions and adjust­ment of sys­tem vari­ables, such as gas-exchange kin­et­ics, abi­ot­ic and bio­lo­gic­al con­tri­bu­tions to iron oxid­a­tion kin­et­ics, and lime­stone kin­et­ic prop­er­ties, without chan­ging the basic PHREEQC cod­ing. Sim­il­ar adjust­ments to key vari­ables can be made with the integ­rated tool. The graph­ic­al and tab­u­lar out­put indic­ates the changes in pH, spe­cif­ic con­duct­ance, total dis­solved solids, alka­lin­ity, net acid­ity, metals, and oth­er solute con­cen­tra­tions of treated efflu­ent plus the cumu­lat­ive quant­ity of pre­cip­it­ated solids as a func­tion of reten­tion time or the amount of caustic agent added. By adjust­ing kin­et­ic vari­ables or chem­ic­al dos­ing, the effects of inde­pend­ent or sequen­tial treat­ment steps that have dif­fer­ent reten­tion times (volume/flow rate), aer­a­tion rates, quant­it­ies of react­ive solids, and tem­per­at­ures can be sim­u­lated for the spe­cified influ­ent qual­ity. The size (land area) of a treat­ment sys­tem can be estim­ated using reac­tion time estim­ates for each of the treat­ment sys­tem com­pon­ents con­sidered in the PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat mod­el. Volume for a cor­res­pond­ing treat­ment step is com­puted as the product of reac­tion time and flow rate; area is com­puted as the volume divided by depth. Altern­at­ively, giv­en the estim­ated reac­tion time to achieve the desired efflu­ent qual­ity, the AMDTreat cost-ana­lys­is mod­el may be used to com­pute the size for each sys­tem com­pon­ent and the cor­res­pond­ing costs for install­a­tion (cap­it­al) and annu­al oper­a­tions and main­ten­ance (O&M), with sum­mary res­ults for the net present value of the treat­ment sys­tem as a whole. Thus, vari­ous pass­ive and/or act­ive treat­ment strategies can be iden­ti­fied that could poten­tially achieve the desired efflu­ent qual­ity but could require dif­fer­ent land areas, equip­ment, and costs for con­struc­tion and O&M.

Workshop Requirements

Attendees are encour­aged to bring a laptop with AMDTreat 6.0 Beta installed. Links and instruc­tions to down­load the soft­ware are provided below. If you need help please reach out before the con­fer­ence or the day of the work­shop.

References

AMDTreat 6.0 Beta (2022) https://www.osmre.gov/programs/reclaiming-abandoned-mine-lands/amdtreat
Cra­votta, C.A. III (2020) Inter­act­ive PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat water-qual­ity mod­el­ing tools to eval­u­ate per­form­ance and design of treat­ment sys­tems for acid mine drain­age (soft­ware down­load): U.S. Geo­lo­gic­al Sur­vey Soft­ware Release (https://doi.org/10.5066/P9QEE3D5)
Cra­votta, C.A. III (2021) Inter­act­ive PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat water-qual­ity mod­el­ing tools to eval­u­ate per­form­ance and design of treat­ment sys­tems for acid mine drain­age: Applied Geo­chem­istry, v 126, 10845 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeochem.2020.104845)

AMDTreat 6.0 Beta and PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat Software Access and Installation

AMDTreat 6.0 Official Web page

The offi­cial web page for AMDTreat 6.0 has links for down­load of the AMDTreat soft­ware, help files, tutori­al videos, bug lists, and oth­er rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion.

AMDTreat | Office of Sur­face Min­ing Reclam­a­tion and Enforce­ment (www.osmre.gov) | https://www.osmre.gov/programs/reclaiming-abandoned-mine-lands/amdtreat

AMDTreat 6.0 tutori­als, You­Tube by AMDTreat team mem­bers avail­able online | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-UVrc-RbMgT-Le9ITND0kenZG2muGvFl

Important

Before installing and run­ning AMDTreat Beta 6.0 or PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat soft­ware pack­ages, the fol­low­ing pre­requis­ites must be installed:

• Microsoft .NET Frame­work 4.8 (x86 and x64) Down­load here
• Install both 32- and 64-bit ver­sions of IPhreeqc­COM Mod­ules:
  • IPhreeqcCOM‑3.7.3–15968-win32.msi
  • IPhreeqcCOM‑3.7.3–15968-x64.msi

Admin­is­trat­ive priv­ileges may be required to install the above pre­requis­ites.

Next, the zip files, below, that include the AMDTreat 6.0 Beta and PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat soft­ware need to be down­loaded and extrac­ted to your com­puter.

PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat and AMDTreat 6.0 Software for download

AMDTreat 6.0 Beta and the stand-alone PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat soft­ware pack­ages that com­ple­ment the integ­rated tool in AMDTreat 6.0 are avail­able at the FTP link below

ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/er/pa/new.cumberland/cravotta/

PHREEQ-N-AMDTreatFiles_2021_v1.4.5.zip | TreatTrainMix2.exe, ParallelTreatment.exe, and CausticTitration.exe tools.

PHREEQ-N-AMDTreat+REYsFiles_2022_v1.0.1.zip | TreatTrainMix2REYs.exe and CausticTitrationMix2REYs.exe tools include rare-earth and selec­ted trace ele­ments.

AMDTreat 6.0 Beta Release_cac.zip | Same as AMDTreat 6.0 Beta at OSMRE web page but includes all cur­rently avail­able help files in pdf.

To access any of the above zip files on FTP: Use Win­dows Explorer to open any folder (e.g. Doc­u­ments) on your com­puter. Copy the above ftp link and paste it into the Doc­u­ments folder address bar, then hit return. Con­tents of the FTP folder should now show. Copy the selec­ted files and paste them on your com­puter. Admin­is­trat­ive priv­ileges should not be needed.

Once down­loaded, users should unzip or copy the con­tents of the AMDTreat 6.0 Beta.zip to a user dir­ect­ory on their loc­al com­puter, and then find the file called AMDTreat 6.0 Beta.exe and double-click on it to run. The screen­shot below shows the dir­ect­ory tree that will be cre­ated and the loc­a­tion of the execut­able file.

Optional – create a shortcut to the executable program on your desktop

Nav­ig­ate to the dir­ect­ory where installed, and find the file named AMDTreat 6.0 Beta.exe. Right-click on the file and select “send to” from the menu and choose “Desktop”. You can now run the pro­gram from this icon that has been cre­ated on your desktop