Yet mining the ore is just one stage in a long and complex gold mining process. Long before any gold can be extracted, significant exploration and development needs to take place, both to determine, as accurately as possible, the size of the deposit as well as how to extract and process the ore efficiently, safely and responsibly.
Gravity concentration has been historically the most important way of extracting the native metal using pans or washing tables. Amalgamation with mercury was used to enhance recovery, often by adding it directly to the riffle tables, and mercury is still widely used in small diggings across the world. However, froth flotation processes may also be used to concentrate the gold. In some cases, particularly when the gold is present in the ore as discrete coarse particles, a gravity concentrate can be directly smeltedto for
The practical, regulatory, and security costs associated with gold production can vary dramatically from region to region. The most expensive place in the world to mine gold is in South Africa. There, allin gold production costs can be more than twice as much as in Peru, which is the least expensive place to mine gold. The process of
Placer mining is the technique by which gold that has accumulated in a placer deposit is extracted. Placer deposits are composed of relatively loose material that makes tunneling difficult, and so most means of extracting it involve the use of water or dredging.
Gold panning is mostly a manual technique of separating gold from other materials. Wide, shallow pans are filled with sand and gravel that may contain gold. The pan is submerged in water and shaken, sortin
Once extracted, the gold is refined with one of four main processes floatation, amalgamation, cyanidation, or carboninpulp. Each process relies on the initial grinding of the gold ore, and more than one process may be used on the same batch of gold ore. Mining
Gold processing, preparation of the ore for use in various products. For thousands of years the word gold has connoted something of beauty or value. These images are derived from two properties of gold, its colour and its chemical stability. The colour of gold is due to the electronic structure of the gold
The Miller process uses gaseous chlorine to extract impurities when gold is at melting point; impurities separate into a layer on the surface of the molten purified gold. The Miller process is rapid and simple, but it produces gold of only about 99.5 percent purity.