Leach Heap Gold

18 Mins in on this Vid, Interesting the lease holder, my understanding, scraped all the surface, made a big heap then dumped water on the top of the heap and collected the gold that was washed out of the bottom of the heap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXR0KcZVFU0&feature=youtu.be

Peter

Pretty sure heap leaching requires some type of chemical/chemical reaction to leach the metal/s out i.e. for gold they use cyanide. Don't think water alone would work?

Heap leaching uses cyanide solution to dissolve out the gold, not just water. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_leaching).

Whether the material in the heap shown is from such an operation is questionable. It may well be just a normal waste dump of non-ore material, which has been capped with surface scrapings to assist rehabilitation of the now-abandoned minesite. The snakeskin and scrub growth indicate that this process is happening quite well for such an arid environment.

not a heap leach

mbasko said:

Pretty sure heap leaching requires some type of chemical/chemical reaction to leach the metal/s out i.e. for gold they use cyanide. Don't think water alone would work?

Click to expand...

Cyanide was common with leach heap for decades but one of our universities developed a new process with amino acids which is supposed to be cheaper and of course environmentally trendy , dont know who is using it though.

Sulphuric acid was used with copper leach heap at a mine i worked at in a huge town called Gulargambone , NSW , population 200 if you include the stray dogs.

Question:How do they collect the gold coming out of the Leach Heap?

Dig a Trench all round the heap with Plastic in the bottom of the trench to help with the flow to the deepest point, then separate the gold and...?

There's heaps of info by Googling "gold heap leaching" but the basics of capturing the solution is in a drainage ditch to a "pregnant" pond then you have to capture or seperate the gold bearing solution - Carbon Absorption Circuits seem to be the process for this leaving a "barren" solution for recycling back into the whole process & a carbon solid solution that requires further processing to retrieve the gold (+ other metals, silver/copper etc. + carbon for re-use).
Easy peasy

PeterInSa said:

Question:How do they collect the gold coming out of the Leach Heap?

Dig a Trench all round the heap with Plastic in the bottom of the trench to help with the flow to the deepest point, then separate the gold and...?

Click to expand...

Mine was a 4 mm rubber membrane , the leaching pad was roadbase leveled by Grader on a few degrees incline then compacted with smoothdrum rollers , the membrane covered the entire pad and the collector channel that ran around the outside diverted it onto a sump fitted with two pumps with nylon or teflon pump impellor and housing , it was pumped to other settlement ponds that had bird scaring devices around them to 'stop the birds stealing any precious metals'

The leach heap was piled up about 10 metres high and they just put irrigation sprinklers on top every 6 metres to keep the stuff soaked down.

The electrolysis was a sight to see , 50,000 amps of power was put across electrodes to collect the copper in sheets of 1000 mm x 1000 mm x 5 mm thick

I think the acid fumes stuffed up any vehicles in the place and it probably burnt everyones nostrils worse than a coke addict but ~ it was a job...