Hi Folks
January 24, 1998
A common question keeps getting asked. Why are the DDs so difficult to assay and process? Certainly somebody must have the answer? Well, the answer is clear to them and to me. There are few excuses considering the amount of money that has gone into the research. There are reasons that explain the difficulties. There are no reasons to justify the time it has taken to get results. True it is more than any one person can do, but collectively and as a prudent research effort, the solutions should be simple. The type of chemistry I believe that is the cause of the problem is the foundation of a many truckloads of papers, thesis and books. Still, that chemistry seems to be accepted by the university scientists, but is largely ignored by the mining professionals.
What I am about to tell you is without permission from one operator of a Lab in Nevada. He says quiet is the best way to do research and to go about business. Never mind, gather around and you may hear a sound. Listen close. Hear it?
Well, I told you that when I see the answer on the horizon I would let you know. Right now I cannot say for sure I have seen that answer on the horizon, but I hear and I feel the rumble on the tracks. Remember what I have told you. When the answer comes it will come with a repeatable assay that will give metallurgical balance. It will come with a process that is irreversible. It will be ultimately capable of separating and producing all of the transition metals, at first the precious metals and then one by one the elemental list will grow. I told you that method will be inexpensive on a ton and a per ounce basis. And I told you that it will be capable of scaling up to 50,000 tons per day, and maybe some day a million tons per day. But the later production needs more than a process to be invented before that time will come. The method will be reasonably explained to any non-Bozonian scientist. Yes, I hear what might be the train of fantastic technology coming down the tracks.
Today there is an assay method that addresses what is the common sense approach to the problem. It might not work on everything, but it certainly has its advantages over anything I have yet seen. The little crusty cluster critters cannot escape this potent extractive assay. The assay is adaptable to removal of the trash elemental interference, therefore providing some reliability to AA and ICP instrumental analysis. But the most reliable part of the assay is that it can be supported by extractive methods. Once the precious metals are in solution, they will report to extraction, refining and weighing. Is the method repeatable? The answer is yes, at least so far. Can the method support process metallurgical balance? The answer is yes to that too. Does the method require special equipment to produce an assay? The answer is yes and I do not have everything that is required at my lab so I can only dabble in the procedures.
And I believe I hear more, there is a process on that track. The rock is subjected to conventional milling. Grind mesh is about the same as grinds used in all fields of ore processing. The grind mesh will vary from ore to ore. The process reagents for most ore will vary from 3 to 30 dollars per ton. Some specialized cases might be higher in reagent cost. From an environmental standpoint the, effluents and pulp waste will be no more or less toxic than the feed resources coming into the plant in the first place. Does the leach process use large amounts of power? The answer is no more than what is needed for running the pumps and motors that run the equipment. Will it work at 50,000 tons a day? Well, it will take some engineering and pilot studies; but I can say it should be scaleable to any size of daily production mining will permit.
The person that is a co-developer of this technique already has patents to processing methods for gold and PGMs. But with this methodology, those patents are reduced to pieces of paper. As I told you once, any process that doesn't address the above targeted requirements will be valuable until the next generation of processes brings processing more in line with what I see as the finality of it all. Fast, cheap and clean.
Now, from what I know now and will tell you, the process stability vs. reversibility is still to be proven. The recycle of reagents remains to be tested and a lot of engineering will be involved before commercial production can commence. In addition a final maiden voyage track has yet to be chosen, that is the deposit and geologic ore type.
I believe this is technology that will benefit all of us, not just the DD miners. It may provide massive amounts of some resources as abundant and cheap forever. Now do you hear those sounds a little more clearly?
So, the question is how to proceed. Certainly a suggestion is to proceed with a DD company that already has the resources. A second is to patent the process internationally and get a big corporate partner to help defend it. A third is to do a paper and give it to the world. I will be interested in hearing what you have to suggest. Remember that I have only heard the train. It is not quite in sight yet. So lets just do a little supposing. mike
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