Ed, the reason for worrying about costs is that in this case we still need to go through the electroplating process to extract the gold. Electroplating is much more expensive than the leaching process. In essence, if you need to use a ton of copper (and I am just using this number out of thin air) for each ton of ore, you now have to plate out a ton of copper before you concentrate the goodies in the sludge. I presume that the cost of plating copper is about $500 to $1000 ton (it is the major cost of copper, and copper is marginally profitable at $.7/lbs, thus taking $.25 to $.5 for electroplating is not exagerated, IMHO, but if anyone has better numbers, please mention these). Now, if a ton of ores has only $462 worth of goodies, getting the goodies in the sludge will cost more than the goodies (and the goodies in the sludge is not yet the purified goodies either).
When we were working on the assumption of $2500 worth od goodies in the pile, $500 to $1000 cost of making the sludge still left a lot of profits on the table, but at $462, you might as well evaporate sea waters and extract the goodies from there.
Having said that, unless the sample that I was given a year ago is not representative, I measured with X-ray fluorescence 110 PPM of AU in it and am still at a loss understanding the COC results.
Zeev
PS And do not look down on honey, this was one of my recommendations and it tripled deposition rates, of course, more consistent surface smoothing agents and dendrites growth inihibitors would be better, but this is another story. |
