copper, page-10

re: questions to reduce my ignorance Righto, sulphides.

Take dirt, make smaller. (y'know, 2 stage crush, grind)

The gentle art of flotation. You can do some research on the web if you like, it was jointly invented at the same time in both australia and england.

Anyway there are a couple of types of flotation, direct or reverse flotation. The difference being whether the product you require floats or sinks respectively.

Take Browns sulphide, a copper, lead, cobalt and nickel sulphide deposit. Now i'd just be guessing here going on other processing routes but it probably goes like this:

Depress cobalt and nickel, float off copper and lead.
Take copper and lead and depress lead, float off copper thus giving two concentrates for copper and lead. They would then float the cobalt and nickel, probably as a mixed concentrate and either sell a mixed concentrate or separate the two metals hydrometallurgically, probably with ion exchange

Here come the tricky part, compass have on their website a new process called Engitec Flubor(http://www.engitec.com/FLUBOR.pdf) which might fit in beatifully with a flotation process or they might attempt to go entirely hydrometallurgical. I quote "The Company's preference is to use the Engitec Flubor ® process for lead recovery ahead of conventional copper, cobalt and nickel recovery. Several other hydrometallurgical processes that have also been successfully demonstrated, to treat the bulk concentrate and produce value added metals."

That tends to suggest that they want to do the Flubor process prior to copper cobalt nickel. I'm not sure how they are going to do this as it's a new process and there is no precedent. I think it may be a bulk flotation to give a copper, lead, nickel, cobalt then they whack it through the flubor process.

I'd be just guessing.