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Gold/Mining/Energy : ECHARTERS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BLZBub who wrote (2914)	9/4/1998 9:54:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3744

Both Syncrude and Suncor have engineering divisions working on the gold an Pt recovery problem. There is about 6 dollars of metal a ton. considering that that is about 2.0 million dollars a day for Suncor it is worth looking into. The oil is worth about 1.5 million dollars. Since they already take the oil out they have a crack at making the process cheap. Cyanide would be too much of a volume cost problem. Some kind of oil flotation might work with a combi gravity circuit as the metals are chunky grains up to 2000 microns. There is native aluminum in the bitumen. Sounds impossible but that is how reducing the environment is. Solvex tried to a combi oil metal thing on low grade oil. I think they used an enzyme leach method that was secret. The were underfunded at about 80 million. To make it work you need good techniques high abrasion resistance engineering and about 300 million. You need to move about 40 thou tons a day minimum. wihtout hot water the tar sand gum up your mills too. They are also a tremendous pollution problem for your off water. I used to pan the rivers running through Suncor and Tintina's property. It was rough gold flakes in limestone bed rivers. Tintina got fire assays in oil soaked sandstone that ran up to .15 and some surface assays that ran to .50. Lac mineral did 6 months assay work in their lab Colorado and then staked a bunch of claims. Barrick took them over and shelved the project. It was low grade and spotty but the Lac geologist told me that they were getting gold and they were one warehouse away from me in Fort McMurray. Some scoffers say that the gold is from glacial push and side running rivers to the glacial trend that concentrated the debris from northern gold deposits in the territories. The basement fault that runs throught this area runs right into yellowknife though and the rusty limestones in this area do yield up gold in fire assays occassionally. This raise the question of where the Saskatchewan river gets it gold in southerly Edmonton. The river could not have dragged gold all the way from the rockies. And if it is from glacial gold why not other rivers in the area? I think the further you drag gold the more it disperses. I favour the local model. The gold is rough small flakes for glacially dragged gold. I would expect the occasional large smooth nugget if it were and there is no record of nuggets in all the literature going back 60 years where gold has been recovered im the rivers of Alberta from streams north of Fort MacMurray or in the Edmonton area. The Saskatchewan is rich enough to support a man who works it in Alberta. I know of people who have done that since the 30's. Bottom line is its not a scam but its strange stuff and will not solution assay nor cyanide because of the bitumen. Recovery process involve treating the oil almost 100% with alcohol or some solution and then attacking the metal. Assay cost to prove the stuff is bulk fire assay with your own lab or alcohol dissolution and then some kind of solvent aqua regia assay. EC<:-}