Richard, yes they do have an AA system, I am not sure it will help, however, since it all depends at what stage the goodies are extracted. Remember, the results of the first leach is a precipitate, and you cannot feed a precipitate to an AA system, you got to get it into solution.
I also think that the "new path" suggested by Jensen in his news release is another onion peeling exercise. The following is my reasoning.
You take 60 lbs of ore and pass it through the leaching process, and if memory serves, we end up with 10 lbs (6 to 1 ratio) of "concentrates". Then we take these concentrates and smelt them, then we take the goodies laden copper, dissolve it and pass the solution over resin. My problem is that taking a pittance of 10 lbs and smelt it must be done in relatively small furnaces (the normal smelting furnaces can hold about 500 lbs), and there is no way you are going to duplicate the conditions between the two systems. Whatever the results from the 60 lbs experiments, these will have little or no bearing on what we will see in the process when carried out in the larger furnaces, unless, of course, you know exactly what conditions you are trying to replicate, but that is asking too much.
If I was asked (not that anyone is) with the current conditions, what is the best approach, it would be to make "batches" that fit exactly a "standard" smelting campaign. Particularly in view of the probable fact that the high temperature smelting process is where you can expect maximum variability. It would be nice to make sure that the pile is homogeneous, but that is a different issue.
In any event, something is still strange, if indeed we get close to 4 ounce of Rh in the less then perfect process, and each of these batches was 10 tons, we should have close to 6x3.77X10=226 ounces of Rh by now, or $135,000 gross receipts. Did GPGI get some of these checks? Are they close to positive cash flow as is? If yes, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead, produce Rh until you have a small kitty to help in finishing peeling this stubborn onion.
Zeev |
