| Summary: | Western Copper's Carmacks copper-gold deposit in the Yukon Territory, Canada contains copper and gold values. The copper mineralization is oxidized and acid soluble, and the gold is free milling and may be extracted by cyanidation. The current treatment plan is to recover the copper by heap leaching, and SX/EW. The challenge of this deposit is to be able to economically extract the remaining gold. In this work, a series of tests were conducted to process a mineral sample for copper extraction by acid column leaching followed by cyanidation for gold extraction. The barren gold solution was then treated by the SART process (sulfidization, acidification, recycle, thickening) for copper recovery as copper sulfide and cyanide recycle. The results of this work were very encouraging with 65% direct copper extraction with acid and 76-82% Au extraction from the copper leach residue by cyanidation. Approximately 21-27% of the copper was co-extracted in cyanidation. SART treatment of the cyanide solution (after carbon adsorption) recovered greater than 95% of the copper as a synthetic copper sulfide precipitate. Additionally, a significant portion of the molybdenum in the ore also leached and was precipitated in the SART process. After filtration and re-neutralization, the recovered cyanide solution was suitable for recycling.
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