Abstract
Abstract
Some of refractory gold ores represent one of the difficult processable ores due to fine dissemination and interlocking of the gold grains with the associated sulphide minerals. This makes it impossible to recover precious metals from sulphide matrices by direct cyanide leaching even at high consumption of cyanide solution. Research to solve this problem is numerous. Application of bacteria shows that, some types of bacteria have great affect on sulphides bio-oxidation and consequently facilitate the leaching process. In this paper, leaching of Saudi gold ore, from Alhura area, containing sulphides before cyanidation is studied to recover gold from such ores applying bacteria. The process is investigated using stirred reactor bio-leaching rather than heap bio-leaching. Using statistical analysis the main affecting variables under studied conditions werde identified. The design results indicated that the dose of bacteria, retention time and nutrition K
2
SO
4
are the most significant parameters. The higher the bacterial dose and the bacterial nutrition, the better is the concentrate grade. Results show that the method is technically effective in gold recovery. A gold concentrate containing >100 g/t gold was obtained at optimum conditions, from an ore containing < 2 g/t gold i.e., 10 ml bacterial dose, 6 days retention time, and 6.5 kg/t K
2
SO
4
as bacteria nutrition.