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Gold/Mining/Energy : Precious and Base Metal Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d:oug who wrote (10782)	5/11/2003 3:03:19 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 39344

I did not exactly say Haber is a scam. I have talked to real milling people who said that they had looked at it. When you look at it carefully, you realize that it only operates on free gold. It was advertised in the 90's all over as a halide/electrolysis process that required you to treat all refractory concentrates with a pre-process of either aqua regia, or some sort of oxidation. The thing is, if you use aqua regia, you don't need Haber, and if you oxidize first then cyanide is cheap and well figured out. Haber is the expensive way by then. It's only claim to fame is that it sidesteps handling cyanide. However, once you get a free-gold non-refractory concentrate, thiourea or cyanide will work too inexpensively and they are dirt cheap, safe when handled carefully, and has time honoured and well figured out abatement processes. It is so hard to keep cyanide "alive" in any milling process that its enviromental abatement is practically assured. Problems with Haber as I see it is, it is expensive to implement, proprietary, not a solution to refractory concentrates or ores. In addition, Haber's "deal" to provide solutions for and an 8% royalty is usurious in the extreme, and would not be by any stretch of the imagination cheaper than well engineered oxidization processes that use cyanide and any one of the perhaps 6 methods of abatement. Many of those oxidization processes used on SW states ores were implemented since 1890, and also 100 years later, by Robert Smith of Barrick. I think the idea of trying to find a chemical process that is safer than cyanide is great. Chlorine gas was tried up until 1895. It has its problems too, but it is not as much an abatement issue. It also was not that successful by itself on refractory cons. ECM:-}