Golden Jubilee Mine

The Golden Jubilee plant is located in Transvaal (South Africa), and was the first mine in the western world to use resin-in-pulp process for the gold recovery from cyanidated pulps. The plant treated an ore with 1.0 to 1.5 g/t gold. Early work indicated that the gold at this mine was not suited to conventional filtration processing, or to heap leaching because of its high clay content. Carbon-in-pulp was employed initially but the results obtained were very bad, gold loading in carbon was low and losses of soluble gold were high. The poor adsorption characteristics of the carbon were found to be caused by abnormally high concentrations of organic material in the ore.

Considering all the problems were initiated testwork programs at Mintek with resins which gave a good performance: high loading capacity and fast kinetics. The RIP pilot plant performed so well that mine management converted its operation from carbon to resin in 1988.

The new plant allowed increase capacity from 200 to 375 tons per day and gold production was almost 10 kg per month. Gold losses were minimized and was possible recover 1 to 2 kg gold more per month with recoveries in the range 85-90%. The plant has five stages of adsorption with 30 minutes retention time per stage, and obtains gold loadings 4000-6000 g/t. The total resin inventory in flow adsorption stages is 2500 liters, one third of the inventory of carbon in the old CIP plant. The cost of elution and regeneration are lower for resin than carbon. [13,14]

Figure 11 shows RIP tanks at Golden Jubilee Mine.