Gold and copper leaching from gold-copper ores and concentrates using a synergistic lixiviant mixture of glycine and cyanide

Abstract

The presence of cyanide soluble copper in the cyanidation of gold-copper ores and concentrates significantly increases the cyanide consumption in order to achieve sufficient gold recovery. In addition, cyanide recovery or cyanide detoxification/destruction processes are also required which adds extra cost to the process. This research introduces a leaching approach to extract gold, silver and copper from gold-copper ores and concentrates using a synergistic lixiviant leaching process using glycine in the presence of low concentrations of cyanide. The effects of glycine and cyanide concentrations on gold, silver and copper leaching kinetics and recovery were studied. It is shown that, in the presence of glycine, gold, silver and copper extraction increase significantly in solutions containing copper-cyanide species at a very low, or zero, free cyanide concentration. It has also been shown that the gold dissolution rate in glycine-cyanide system is almost three times higher than the gold dissolution rate in the conventional cyanidation. Kinetic studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of glycine concentration, pH, and CN/Cu ratio on the dissolution of gold and silver. It has also been shown that the gold dissolution rate increases by increasing the glycine concentration up to 2.0g/L (Gly:Cu molar ratio of 2.2:1) and any further glycine addition has no significant effect on the dissolution of gold. It is shown that the presence of glycine in solutions containing copper (I)-cyanide species can significantly enhance the dissolution of precious and base metals. The proposed leaching approach significantly reduces the cyanide consumption by at least 75% and most of the copper is present as cupric glycinate in the final leach solution. In addition, gold, silver and copper extraction was higher than the conventional cyanidation process utilising similar cyanide dosages for all the gold-copper sources studied.