Chemistry Weekly Seminar - Dr. Stephen Foley

Better gold through chemistry

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Stephen Foley

Department of Chemistry, University of Saskatchewan

December 6, 2019 seminar

For more than a century most of the world's gold has been recovered using cyanide or concentrated acids. In 2018, global gold mine production was 3,330 tonnes yet the average gold mine yields only 3 grams of gold per tonne of ore that is mined necessitating a massive, energy intensive and environmentally damaging infrastructure. More effective extractants with higher selectivities that can operate under more benign conditions are highly desirable for both environmental and economical concerns, especially with regards to recycling gold from secondary sources such as electronic waste. For the last six years we have focussed on developing new chemical processes for the selective recovery and recycling of precious metals from both primary and secondary sources. This talk will focus on the progress we have made in developing better gold recovery processes and our attempts to move the chemistry from the benchtop to a viable industrial process.