Altın Üretiminde Siyanür Tüketiminin Azaltılması İçin Farklı Bir Yöntem: Gravite Zenginleştirme ve Liç Kombinasyonu

Abstract

Gold minerals are primarily recovered by cyanidation which accounts for 83% of the world gold production, cyanide consumption and concurrently the environmental concerns are expected to increase in the foreseeable future with the forecasted increase in gold production. In this study, an alternative gold treatment process is proposed to reduce the cyanide consumption. The process was applied to Izmir-Menderes gold ore and the results were compared with the conventional leach process. In conventional system, cyanidation is applied directly to the ore to extract the gold. In the alternative process, gold is pre-concentrated first with the gravity based Knelson concentrator, then, cyanidation is applied only to the pre-concentrate instead of the whole ore. In this study, a pre-concentrate containing 93 g/t of gold was produced from a gold ore with 6.7 g/t grade, using only water during processing. The cyanidation is only applied to this pre-concentrate. Thus, this alternative process saves about 70% cyanide.