Leaching of Telluride

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Jorge February 18, 2019

The plant has a capacity of 1200 tons (imperial) per day. The mode of the occurrence of
the precious metals is complex, and the physical nature of the ore highly variable. The
incidence of primary fines, at times up to 40%, is a major problem.

Immediately after grinding in circuit (cyanide) solution, a telluride concentrate is

produced. The remainder of the main pulp stream is cyanided, filtered, washed, and
repulped with fresh water. This pulp is then treated with roaster gas, containing sulphur
dioxide, and after further conditioning, a sulphide flotation concentrate is produced.

Flotation of the tellurides is carried out immediately after grinding and classification.
Three stages of flotation are employed and as grinding is conducted in circuit solution
the presence of lime and cyanide effectively depress the major proportion of the
sulphides present.

Testwork conducted prior to the introduction of telluride flotation, and early plant trials
indicated that gold and silver recovery from telluride flotation concentrates presented a
number of difficulties. Direct cyanidation of telluride concentrates after one stage of
cleaning was attempted. Both cyanidation rate, and recovery were unacceptably low.
Also residual reagents produced an uncontrollable froth condition.

These difficulties were overcome by roasting the concentrate, and cyanidation of the
calcine. This separate treatment of the tellurides, as opposed to the previous procedure
where they were bulk, floated with the sulphides, and calcined in Edwards roasters, had
several advantages..

In testwork recently conducted, it was found that extremely fine grinding of the raw
concentrates followed by cyanidation, gave improved gold recovery, 99% being achieved
consistently but dissolution rate was prohibitively slow, up to fourteen days being
required for some charges.

Of all the systems tested, the most successful was basic hypochlorite oxidation. The
reagent combination is NaOH and Na2CO3/Ca(OCl)2. By controlling the
tellurium/chlorine ratio, complete oxidation of the tellurides can be achieved in one
hour. Cyanidation is normally complete after three to four hours contact time.

Initial attempts at tellurium extractions from roasted concentrates gave low recoveries
as mentioned earlier. The extraction method employed was to leach the roasted
concentrates prior to cyanidation with 20% NaOH. The leach liquor was neutralised
with HCl, precipitating a tellurous acid/oxide mixture.

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After much investigation, the Na2S/Na2SO3 process was chosen, as it had many
advantages. In this method, the cyanidation residue (either a cyanided calcine or a
cyanided chemical oxidation charge) is leached with Na2S solution. Elemental tellurium
is then precipitated by the addition of Na2SO3. The precipitate is of high purity for
while Na2S is an effective solvent of oxidized tellurium compounds, the major possible
contaminents Fe, Pb & Cu remain predominately in the residue.

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