David Dreisinger

A Review on Recovery of Copper and Cyanide From Waste Cyanide Solutions

The mainstream technology for leaching gold from gold ore is still leaching in aqueous alkaline cyanide solution. However, when copper minerals are present in the gold ore, high levels of free cyanide must be maintained during leaching because many common copper minerals react with cyanide, forming copper cyanide complexes that deplete the solution of free cyanide. This results in a significant economical penalty through excessive cyanide consumption and loss of valuable copper in tails. Environmental constraints controlling the discharge of cyanide from mining industry are being tightened by local governments worldwide. The solution chemistry of copper in cyanide solution and various technologies for the recovery of copper and cyanide from barren gold cyanide solutions were reviewed in the paper. Direct recovery methods are mainly based on the acidification–volatilization–reneutralization (AVR) process or its modifications. These processes are not very efficient for treating low cyanide solutions and high metal cyanide solutions due to their substantial operational cost. Indirect recovery technologies by activated carbon, ion-exchange resins (IX) and solvent extraction (SX) have been extensively studied. The basic principle of these technologies is to pre-concentrate copper (and part of cyanide) into a small volume of eluant or stripping solution. The copper and cyanide in the resulted solutions can be further recovered by AVR or similar processes or by the electrowinning process. Activated carbon is only suitable for use as a polishing process to remove cyanide to lower levels from those cyanide solutions where the cyanide content is already low. Compared to activated carbon, ion exchange resins are less easily poisoned by organic matter and can usually be eluted at room temperature, and selectivity for particular metals can be achieved by the choice of the functional group incorporated into the bead or by the selective elution process. Solvent extraction process developed base on guanidine and modified quaternary amines exhibit relative fast extraction kinetics and can be operated in a continuous manner. It will be necessary to thicken and wash the solids in order to produce a clarified feed solution while treating the slurry from operations using carbon-in-pulp (CIP) for the recovery of gold. Other copper and cyanide recovery technologies such as biosorption or direct electrowinning were also proposed, but they have still not found their way to practical application.

The Search Minerals Direct Extraction Process for Rare Earth Element Recovery

The Search Minerals Foxtrot project in Labrador is a surface deposit enriched in the highly sought after heavy rare earth elements. Early metallurgical work investigated beneficiation of the rare earth content of the Foxtrot resource using flotation, gravity separation and magnetic separation. The concentrate was then processed by acid baking and water leaching to produce a REE leachate for purification and recovery.

The Demonstration Pilot Plant Results for the Search Minerals Direction Extraction Process for Rare Earth Recovery

Search Minerals has developed a Direct Extraction Process for recovery of rare earths from the Foxtrot and Deep Fox deposits in Labrador Canada. The process includes crushing, acid treatment, water leaching, impurity removal, precipitation of an intermediate rare earth product and finally refining of the intermediate product to produce a high purity mixed rare earth oxide (~99% total rare each oxides). The Direct Extraction Process has been validated in an extensive demonstration pilot plant program at SGS Minerals. A total of 3 tonnes of material was processed to produce final mixed rare earth product. The results of the demonstration pilot plant program are reported.

Hydrometallurgical Extraction of Precious, Rare and Base Metals Using an Oxidizing Acid Chloride Heap Leach

A process has been developed to extract gold, silver, indium, gallium, lead, copper, zinc, and other metals from a large resource using an oxidizing acid chloride heap leaching technology. The ore is crushed and/or ground to improve reactivity and then contacted with a solution containing NaCl-HCl-NaOCl. The value metals are leached into solution as chloro-complexes. The leachate is treated in a series of separation and recovery processes to produce separate saleable or disposable products. The paper will provide a summary of process development and application to a silver-indium ore from Bolivia. The possible application of the process to other ore types will be presented for discussion.

Polymet Mining Corporation’s Northmet Process Development

Recent process development work for the recovery of copper, nickel, cobalt and precious metals (Au, Pt, Pd) from PolyMet’s NorthMet deposit is described. The process uses a number of flotation process steps combined with hydrometallurgical treatment to produce a range of possible products including copper and nickel flotation concentrates for custom smelting, mixed nickel and cobalt hydroxide for refining and a precious metal precipitate for treatment.