A kinetic and electrochemical study of the ammonia cyanide process for leaching gold in solutions containing copper

One of the biggest challenges for the gold industry in the 21st century is the presence of copper in gold containing ore bodies. This is because copper consumes large quantities of cyanide. In addition, copper cyanide species are more stable than free cyanide, and hence are problematic in events of tailings spillage. One of the methods which has been suggested for treating copper containing ores is to leach with an ammonia cyanide solution. The effect of copper and ammonia addition on gold leaching kinetics was studied in the present paper. It will be shown that when the solutions do not contain copper, the addition of ammonia decreases the rate of gold leaching. When copper is added to solution, the leach rate does decrease due to the formation of the copper cyanide complexes. However it will be shown that under conditions of zero free cyanide, gold does leach readily via the Cu(CN)₃²⁻ complex. It was found that the addition of ammonia had little effect on the leaching of gold by Cu(CN)₃²⁻, but did increase the leaching kinetics when the major cyanide species present is Cu(CN)₂⁻. Under these conditions, leaching in the absence of ammonia is very slow. The effect of copper(II) addition was also studied, and it was found that in the absence of free cyanide the presence of copper(II) increases the leach rate, provided there is enough ammonia to stabilise it against reaction with the copper(I) cyanide complexes.