Muruntau Mine

The Muruntau mine is located in Uzbekistan. The Muruntau mine is one of the large st gold mines in the world and because of its isolation and the secrecy that has surrounded it for so long; its activities have been a source of intense interest to all those in the gold mining. Muruntau is remarkable because of the nature of the orebody can use a process many times overlooked like the Resin-in-Pulp process.

Muruntau lies in a low range of hills protruding through the sands of the Kyzylkum desert. The range is part of the Tian Shan fold belt, which is an extension of the Tian Shan Mountains, which host most of the important mineral deposits in Uzbekistan. [15] The first geological map was published in 1912 and exploration of the deposit started in 1958. The mine production started in 1967.

The orebody is a gold bearing quartz stockwork, which had a surface outcrop of about 1,000 x 800 m. the open pit has dimensions of about 2,500 x 3,500 m, and is 300 m deep. Final pit depth under current mining plans will be 650 m; the mineralization is known to extend to a depth of at least 1,500 m and there are long term plans for underground mining. All the ore is oxide. The are free gold of variable grain size and minor gold associated with sulphides, primarily arsenopyrite and some quantities of cyanide soluble base metals in the ore.

The plant treats in average an ore with 2.4 g/t gold at the rate of 2200 tpd. The ore is transferred from trucks to trains for the approximately 10 km journey to the mill. The ore is crushed and sent to a SAG mill and the grinding product processed by gravimetry. The coarse gold concentrate is directly smelted. The ground product is thickened, leached with cyanide and treated by a RIP process. The loaded resin is eluted by complex three stage elution process. The first stage removes zinc and nickel with sulphuric acid. Ammoniacal ammonium nitrate solution is then later used to remove copper, and finally gold and silver are removed with thiourea. Precious metals are recovered by electrowinning. The final recovery is 92-94%.

The RIP process uses a mixed weak/strong base resin named AM-2b [15,16]. The flowsheet is shown in Figure 12. [5]