Can Gold Be Recovered from Tailings?
Yes, gold can be recovered from tailings when grade, deportment and tonnage support a recovery route. Practical testwork determines the right method.
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Blogs & Insights / Recovery Methods
Recovery methods
Whether tailings gold is recoverable, and the full method families used to recover it: gravity, flotation, cyanide and alternative leaching, pre-concentration, and the combined flowsheets that tie them together.
Modern Tailings Recovery Methods
Tailings gold recovery methods explain gravity, flotation, CIL, and hybrid flowsheets for retreating gold-bearing tailings in Ghana.
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Gravity Recovery of Gold from Tailings
Gravity recovery separates gold from gangue using density difference, recovering free, liberated gold cheaply before any reagent-consuming stage.
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Knelson Concentrators for Tailings
Knelson concentrators recover gold from tailings using centrifugal force, capturing fine free gold that older gravity equipment misses.
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Falcon Concentrators: How They Work
Falcon concentrators recover gold from tailings using a smooth-bowl centrifugal design, with SB and UF models suited to different duty.
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Spiral Concentrators in Gold Recovery
Spiral concentrators recover gold from tailings using a helical trough, offering lower capital cost and higher throughput than centrifugal units.
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Shaking Tables for Fine Gold
Shaking tables clean and upgrade gravity concentrate from tailings, almost always as a cleaning stage rather than primary recovery.
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Centrifugal vs Conventional Gravity Separation
Centrifugal gravity separation recovers finer gold than conventional gravity separation, at the cost of higher capital and power per tonne.
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Fine Gold Recovery: The Sub-75-Micron Problem
Fine gold recovery targets particles below roughly 75 microns, the size threshold where conventional gravity equipment stops capturing gold efficiently.
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Carbon-in-Leach (CIL) for Tailings
Carbon-in-leach recovers fine and surface-bound gold from tailings by dissolving and adsorbing it in the same tank, the standard final stage of a modern flowsheet.
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Carbon-in-Pulp (CIP) Explained
Carbon-in-pulp recovers gold from tailings by leaching first and adding carbon afterward in separate tanks, splitting into two stages what CIL does at once.
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CIL vs CIP: Which Suits Tailings Retreatment?
CIL suits most tailings retreatment better than CIP because fine, oxidized tailings gold generally leaches fast enough for simultaneous adsorption to work.
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Cyanidation Basics: Chemistry of Gold Leaching
Cyanidation dissolves gold into solution via the Elsner equation, the chemistry behind both CIL and CIP.
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Flotation of Gold Tailings
Flotation recovers gold from tailings indirectly, by floating the sulphide minerals gold is commonly associated with to the surface as a froth.
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Sulphide Flotation Before Leaching
Leaching only the flotation concentrate rather than the whole feed concentrates cyanide demand onto a small, upgraded fraction of the mass.
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Refractory Gold in Tailings: Roasting, BIOX and POX
Refractory gold resists standard cyanidation until an oxidative pretreatment, roasting, BIOX, or pressure oxidation, breaks it open.
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Ultrafine Gold: The Limits of Recovery
Ultrafine gold sits at or past the practical recovery limit of gravity, flotation, and even leaching alike in tailings retreatment.
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Heap Leaching Reprocessed Tailings
Heap leaching reprocesses tailings on a lined pad with cyanide irrigation over weeks or months, a lower-capital alternative to tank leaching.
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Thiosulphate Leaching: A Cyanide Alternative
Thiosulphate leaching dissolves gold using a copper-ammonia catalyzed system, a genuine but conditional alternative to cyanide.
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Glycine and Other Emerging Lixiviants
Glycine-based leaching and other emerging lixiviants aim to cut reagent cost and footprint, but remain early-stage relative to cyanidation.
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Magnetic and Density Separation as Pre-Concentration
Magnetic and dense media separation pre-concentrate gold tailings by rejecting barren gangue in bulk before gravity, flotation or leach circuits.
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Combined Gravity-Leach Flowsheets
Combined gravity-leach flowsheets recover gold from tailings in two sequential stages, gravity capturing coarse gold first, leaching the rest.
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