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Gold/Mining/Energy : Steppe Gold (SPE:V)

SPE 15.24

+0.3%

Nov 7 4:00 PM EST

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To: John Stokes who wrote (643)	2/18/1998 8:24:00 PM
From: John Menzies	Read Replies (1) of 1248

Base metal deposit exploitation: John , now you are getting into the techncial stuff. The Electrowinning part of the process is the last stage. The entire process involves firstly mining and crushing the ore then putting the metals of economic importancee say copper- zinc - gold and/or silver into solution. This is where it can get complex. When you have an oxide copper or gold deposit this is most often pretty simple. Acid will dissolve copper (and sometimes zinc) and cyanide will do the same for gold and silver. It gets more complex when you have a combination of say copper and gold. The challenge is that the concentration of metals in such a solution is too low to economically run an electrowinning cell. The solution for copper is to use a solvent to extract the copper from the acidic solution and then strip this with hot more concentrated acid to produce a solution with a high concentration of copper which can then be placed in an EW cell. The result high purity copper. The main expense the electricity - a lot of it. You can do something similar with some zinc deposits. The essense of this is that you have to be able to get the economic metals into solution at reaonable cost. This is usually quite easy with oxide deposits. With deposits like Kosmurun and for example the Western Copper deposit in Mexico or Kidd Creekm in Canada only a small portion of the metals would be soluble in a low concentration acid solution ( you can dissolve almost anything if you use very strong acid - but the cost goes up) To recover the metals you have to oxidise the sulphides- a relatively simple process. There are a number of methods used fo this including roasting the ore or a concentrate of the ore and smelting or leaching the metals of interest. some other technlogies are BIOX (bacterial oxidation) whch is having increasing application and various hydromet processes involving pressure and temperature and various reageants to oxidise the sulphides and occasionally destroy activated carbon etc. The answer to your question was probably more than you were expecting - hope this was educational and reasonably accurate. In the near term the Sulphide deposits which the company is evaluating will produce some gold metal but also a concentrate which will require smelting. I am sure that in the future the hydro met techniques under development will largely replace smelting.

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