# coal with metals group platinum



## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

Good morning everyone, I'm having difficulties extracting gold and PMG platinum group metals from coal in grains. THE COAL IS WITH THESE METALS, I wish someone could help me a more effective route.
I'll be very grateful.
+55 19 98353-7773
diego vilela


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 27, 2022)

In order to help you we need more information.
First, have you any experience in PM refining/reclaiming?
How do you know there are PGMs in the coal?
What route have you followed so far?
How much material do you have?
What kind of facilities do you have for processing.

When these are answered someone may chime in and point you in the right direction.


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## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

thanks for the quick response,
yes I have experience with PMG metals.

X-ray analyzes were carried out proving these metals in the coal.

I initially have 2 ton.

I have a shed to process.

My doubt is to know the best way to remove the metals from this coal.

appreciate


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 27, 2022)

You mean you have a XRF test that shows PGMs in the coal?
If so I would get a proper assay done. XRF are notorious prone to errors regarding PGMs.
Especially Iridium and Rhodium.
Do you have a XRF report that you can show us?

How have you tried to process it before?
If it actually has PGMs, I would burn the coal and save the ashes, they will be much more concentrated in the ashes.
Where are the shed, far away from people?


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## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

with the ashes in hand, is the best way to work with acids or leach with koh and nacn?


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 27, 2022)

That depends entirely on what it is?
Do you have a test showing the composition?


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## nickvc (Aug 27, 2022)

I hate to burst your bubble but I doubt very much you have values in your coal especially if you are only using xrf results for your proof, if you have burnt your coal to ash then mix your ash with HCl and add bleach or hydrogen peroxide, do this upwind not inside and test the resulting solution with stannous and show us your results.


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## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

ok thanks i will try to do that. I will send a photo of the raw charcoal


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 27, 2022)

diego said:


> ok thanks i will try to do that. I will send a photo of the raw charcoal


Sorry mate, a picture of the coals don’t give any information.

A picture of the XRF test may or may not.

I’m struggling to see how there can be PGMs in coal. Coal are geologically compressed wood or other organics over a few million years. 
For PGMs to be in there, they would have had to be a part of a hydrotermal vent or other hydro-geological events happening after the coal had been created.
Unless you are talking about Active Carbon used to pull PGMs out of a leaching solution.

Then the ones that did it would most likely have treated it them selves??


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## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

Yes My friend that's right buddy is leach coal, i figured i was clear when saying at the beginning.


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 27, 2022)

What kind of leach has been done for the PGMs?
Cyanide or other?


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## diego (Aug 27, 2022)

leaching was done with sodium hypochlorite and nacl then passed the liquid through charcoal.... leaching was also done with ammonia for 7 days we put naoh ph 14 and added charcoal. all metals went to coal


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## Golddigger76 (Aug 27, 2022)

Believe it or not, when I was working in Wyoming I came across some studies by the state of Wyoming discussing the presence and recovery of gold, silver, and platinum group metals from coal ashes that came from the Thunder Basin Coal mine. It was surprisingly rich with precious metals. In Wyoming there's an abundance of coal ashes generated by power plants and sugar factories that are coal fired. 
When I was in working in North Dakota there was another sugar factory that burned coal from the thunder basin mine also and the manager told me that I could send simi trucks and they would load them for free and no charge for the ashes. 
They used the ashes for cement and a drying agent for drilling mud used on oil rigs when it had to be disposed of.
You can do a Google search and find the document .
Sadly I never pursued it while I was there because in my spare time I was mining in the black hills of South Dakota.


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 28, 2022)

diego said:


> leaching was done with sodium hypochlorite and nacl then passed the liquid through charcoal.... leaching was also done with ammonia for 7 days we put naoh ph 14 and added charcoal. all metals went to coal


What they usually do is to ash the coal in shallow trays at 600ish centigrade over night in electric furnaces.
The ash is then collected and leached with what ever method you prefer.
Aqua Regia, HCl/Cl, Hypochlorite, Cyanide.

There is an excellent thread made by a member with the name Deano, discussing this in quite some detail.









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## Yggdrasil (Aug 28, 2022)

Golddigger76 said:


> Believe it or not, when I was working in Wyoming I came across some studies by the state of Wyoming discussing the presence and recovery of gold, silver, and platinum group metals from coal ashes that came from the Thunder Basin Coal mine. It was surprisingly rich with precious metals. In Wyoming there's an abundance of coal ashes generated by power plants and sugar factories that are coal fired.
> When I was in working in North Dakota there was another sugar factory that burned coal from the thunder basin mine also and the manager told me that I could send simi trucks and they would load them for free and no charge for the ashes.
> They used the ashes for cement and a drying agent for drilling mud used on oil rigs when it had to be disposed of.
> You can do a Google search and find the document .
> Sadly I never pursued it while I was there because in my spare time I was mining in the black hills of South Dakota.


Interesting, there must have been some rich runoff water running through it for a few million years back in the days. Cool


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## orvi (Aug 28, 2022)

Plausible. But not very high chance. First off - check the XRF and select proper mode for analysis. If you are doing XRF of coal (light elements material) on precious metals mode, it gets confused and "find" whatever it thinks should be there. You need to have homogenous sample, and zapp it on Geochem mode - which takes the matrix properly and does not get confused when the sample consist of 95+% light elements. 

This will get you less skewed result, and it also should be taken just as informal result. If you take the ashes, smelt them with some bismuth or copper as collector metals, and then XRF the dore on PRECIOUS METALS mode, and obtain results that confirms PGMs or precious metals present, then you can buy the bottle of champaigne  
Next step is proper analysis for PGMs (fire assay using NiS), which isn´t cheap... But you will have bulletproof result that the values are there - and then, you can open that bottle of champaigne that you bought earlier   that is how industry works. Altough, they are going from raw XRF straight to the proper analysis. Guys in the industry aren´t stupid, they do it for the good reasons 

(Light elements for XRF are all elements above aluminium in periodic table  )


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## diego (Aug 28, 2022)

thank you all very much for your opinion, you are very wise, I realized that this subject is somewhat complex... but I already had a light on what to proceed.


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## diego (Aug 28, 2022)

do you know if there is rhodium ore in latin america? more precisely Brazil .... have you heard if it exists?


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## stoneware (Aug 28, 2022)

diego said:


> do you know if there is rhodium ore in latin america? more precisely Brazil .... have you heard if it exists?


Assays from Pedra Branca PGE Project, Brazil:

Link The Report.


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## galenrog (Aug 28, 2022)

We could have a translation issue on this thread. The image provided by the OP appears to be charcoal pellets. Probably activated charcoal. Also known as activated carbon. From his posts, I get the impression that it was used to strip the leach liquid of PMs, and needs a method to further recover PMs. 

Does this seem reasonable, or is my stroke addled brain misinterpreting again?

Time for more coffee.


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## diego (Aug 28, 2022)

yes your reasoning is correct.


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## Yggdrasil (Aug 28, 2022)

galenrog said:


> We could have a translation issue on this thread. The image provided by the OP appears to be charcoal pellets. Probably activated charcoal. Also known as activated carbon. From his posts, I get the impression that it was used to strip the leach liquid of PMs, and needs a method to further recover PMs.
> 
> Does this seem reasonable, or is my stroke addled brain misinterpreting again?
> 
> Time for more coffee.


No he already have confirmed this, a HypoChlorite Saline leach.
So what he call Coal is in fact Activated Carbon.


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## jphayesjr (Aug 29, 2022)

Yggdrasil said:


> Sorry mate, a picture of the coals don’t give any information.
> 
> A picture of the XRF test may or may not.
> 
> ...


Geo-hydrothermal intrusion of coal deposits into kimberlite pipes are very rare, and known to occur only at great depths in a few areas where there were cataclysmic events that occurred a lot later than the earth started to extrude the kimberlite pipes. Basically, this occurred in a few a places where the kimberlite was surfacing under ancient deeply sedimented sea beds that then were disrupted and subducted by plate shifts or by meteor impacts and or titanic volcanic eruptions. The seams of coal are relatively small, and very hard. I have seen samples from the western USA, they looked dark brownish. I think the coal was tested high for silicon, Sulfur, in some places tellurium , Hg, Fe. I saw no data re PGMs in the coal. In the kimberlite, yes, absolutely. 

The sea beds later became dry land. Hard for me to see how PGMs would have infiltrated the coal, it would have more likely been the kimberlite, from columns of subducted water loaded with PMs and conductor base metals. I have samples of PGM laden blackish blue kimberlite from one of my claims. The diamonds are pinpoint sized, bright, but pretty much useless as gems. Maybe industrial? The PGM, Au, Ag content assayed is significant. The coal in the photos is black. He needs fire assays and chemical assays.


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## jphayesjr (Aug 29, 2022)

galenrog said:


> We could have a translation issue on this thread. The image provided by the OP appears to be charcoal pellets. Probably activated charcoal. Also known as activated carbon. From his posts, I get the impression that it was used to strip the leach liquid of PMs, and needs a method to further recover PMs.
> 
> Does this seem reasonable, or is my stroke addled brain misinterpreting again?
> 
> Time for more coffee.


My Spanish relatives speak about charcoal and coal a little ambiguously, using the word "carbón" to refer to both...perhaps my quatro-lingual brain is muddled up, but you are probably on to something here. It's not 'el carbón mineral" but "el carbón vegetal/carbón vexetal." (a lot of my relatives are Galegos or Asturians. Activated filtering charcoal. Good insight.


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## diego (Aug 29, 2022)

*Yes My friend, speak coal activ ....no mineral*


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## orvi (Aug 29, 2022)

diego said:


> *Yes My friend, speak coal activ ....no mineral*


Now we are talking about something completely different and much more plausible 

Carefully ash the activated carbon, and smelt the ashes with suitable collector metal (copper or bismuth for example) and flux. I think borax will form thick slag from the ashes, but I can be wrong. Maybe also sodium hydroxide would be suitable, as ashes mainly consist of carbonates of sodium and potassium.

Be careful when doing this and use flame hot enough to properly melt everything. Oxy/acetylene or oxy/propane are the best choices when using the torch melting. Of course, induction furnance or better muffle furnances would be more convenient (from my point of view).

Note that lead isn´t very good collector metal for PGMs.

And also that in the carbon matrix, PGMs are adsorbed as chlorometallates. Due to this, it will maybe wise to use basic flux - not to vaporize these PGM complexes when ashing. So sodium carbonate or hydroxide could be beneficial over boric acid or borax.

It is enough to produce button large enough to be properly analyzed by XRF - when hammered flat and sanded/polished. From my experience 1,5 g is perfectly sufficient.


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## diego (Aug 29, 2022)

you guys are very good...thanks a lot for the information. I will initially start along the route of calcination to ash and chemical attack


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## diego (Sep 5, 2022)

Good afternoon, is there any palladium deplating agent that does not harm the piece? I have palladium-bathed semi-jewels and I need to remove the palladium without attacking the base of the piece. could someone help


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## jphayesjr (Sep 6, 2022)

diego said:


> you guys are very good...thanks a lot for the information. I will initially start along the route of calcination to ash and chemical attack


Check with How to Choose Gold Smelting Flux - Superb Electromachinery Co., Limited I think they can recommend a suitable flux for parting from ashed charcoal.


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