Direct Hydro-oxidation of Pyrrhotite with full sulphide oxidation

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Gold mining companies are among the largest resource extraction companies in Canada, with significant**contribution to the Canadian economy. Canadian gold mining companies make up a large proportion of the**global gold mining companies, and currently 3 largest gold producing companies out of the world's top 5 are**Canadian.**Canada has significant gold reserves which contain arsenic as an impurity, mostly in Ontario and Quebec.**However the cost for the gold extraction is high, mostly due to the arsenic immobilization step, making most of**the deposits economically unviable.**Dundee Sustainable Technology, a Quebec based company, has developed a process to recover the arsenic**from the arsenic containing gold ores and immobilize it as a highly stable glass phase. The product of the**arsenic extraction and immobilization process is a pyrrhotite product which encapsulates the fine gold particles.**To make the gold amenable to gold leaching and extraction, it is important to oxidize sulphides (i.e. pyrrhotite)**before gold extraction process.**The objective of this proposed project is to develop an atmospheric oxidation process to oxidize the sulphides**(pyrrhotite) and liberate gold. If successful, the process can be combined with the DST arsenic immobilization**process, and the two processes together would be an extremely low cost and sustainable inclusive process for**arsenic immobilization and gold metal recovery. This process is expected to be highly valuable as it would be**applicable to the Canadian arsenical gold deposits, mostly being uneconomic deposits at the moment.