Extracting Gold from Seawater

[cejohnsonsr1]

I can't believe this is still a thing. Gold in sea water is in its atomic state. It's not bound to the salt or anything else if I remember correctly. The problem is that there are probably no more than half a dozen atoms of gold in any cubic yard of sea water. On a planetary scale, yes, that's a lot of gold. As a practical matter, it's impossible to process enough water in a day to produce a gram of gold and even if you could the cost would be exponentially beyond prohibitive.

 

[Maysam]

"Why are you this much pessimistic? If you are professional, you must see that the stone is wet and there is no shine of mica on them!"

Maysam, you've been on the forum for less than a day and this is the second post I've found where you're attacking a Mod/Admin. What is your deal? Also, if you have a complaint about someone's fact's here, it's on you to prove it wrong with some sort of documentation, citation, research, etc. Telling other people to "go look it up" is a logical fallacy argument and doesn't help

we do rely on research done before, because it would take immense effort to validate all things by ourselves. i dont have access to measure picogram quantities of gold in the whatever quantity of water. some folks had the right equipment and recieved the numbers we have. and there wasn´t one, there were many of them
i dont think that me or you can do better in analysis of such a low concentration of element. researchers didn´t have equivalent samples, and if you look to the numbers given here, you will see vast difference in concentration, depending on location. previously described (higher) numbers were questioned in terms of contamination. how do you asses no contamination from the enviroment, transportation or instruments alone, regarding nearly everything inside the machines is made of metal ?
use search engine. most of the research you think of had been done before.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0012821X9090060Bhttps://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-gold-is-in-the-ocean-4165904https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/908/1/012045/pdf
there is even a patent claiming process of extraction of gold from seawater, altough from 1901. and when you read first like 50 lines, it become obvious that this is complete nonsense

https://patents.google.com/patent/US679215A/en
more research reveal some older data:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0375674288900519
recent advantage of usin MOF (metal-organic frameworks) with built polymeric substances inside the cavities, capable to adsorb, encage and chemicaly selectively reduce Au3+ to nanoparticles of gold. this may be the future of wastewater and seawater goldmining, if there would be some anywhere in the future:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.8b09555

Hi Orvi.
I have qout for myself that is "NO ONE IS NEVER HONEST ABOUT GOLD".

 

[Riteturn]

Read: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jacs.8b09555
It's highly complex tech to get detectable amounts and municipal sewage is a much better source than sea water.

 

[Maysam]

Read: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jacs.8b09555
It's highly complex tech to get detectable amounts and municipal sewage is a much better

Hi,
It might be possible with MOFs.

 

[orvi]

Hi,
It might be possible with MOFs, only if you can produce very low price Fe-BTC/Pppda MOF and leave it in the sea water for periods of time to exract gold. According to the experience in the article you can calculate amount of gold obtained in one week using 1 ton of MOF for example. But the most important limit I found during my studies was high conc metals like sodium or so, because MOF can extract 99% of gold, on the other hand it extracts about a few hundredth percent of sodium for example. The matter is that for example 0,01% of thousands ppm will overtake 99% of a few ppb gold.
Finally tere is a problem with sewage, that is we have nano particles and not dissolved gold. So it is mor difficult to dissolve and extract it.

i put my hands off of this. it could be done, in the paper from JACS they elaborated it and get the actual gold from the seawater. for me, that is a proof it can be done and it is the end of the story

 

[Maysam]

I don't know how, but I'm sure you can do whatever the he he he you want. Just don't give up. Good luck

 

[butcher]

Yes, but why would I want to spend my life trying to get a grain of gold from a few million tons of saltwater, when I could just go and pick it up a few ounces of gold easily from the sands of the beach, then I could spend my time working on something useful, like growing wings on my back and flying to the moon for a little vacation.

 

[Maysam]

Yes, but why would I want to spend my life trying to get a grain of gold from a few million tons of saltwater, when I could just go and pick it up a few ounces of gold easily from the sands of the beach, then I could spend my time working on something useful, like growing wings on my back and flying to the moon for a little vacation.

Hi Butcher,
can you give us more information about gold in sand of beaches?

 

[Martijn]

On beaches in areas where gold is found in rock and in rivers, you can likely also find it in the beach sand.
Googled for alaska beach gold and first hit:


When someone makes a statement and you are not sure if it's true, or you don't understand it, do your own research!!! Not that we're unwilling to answer, but doing your own research will let it sink in better.
You will have more questions answered than you could have come up with. Dive in. Google it. There are tons of scientific papers on most subjects. Yes! sugar really is soluble in water, but not because I say so.

 

[galenrog]

A general internet search of the terms “beach mining gold” will give thousands of results. You will have to sift through the fluff and nonsense found with any internet search, but there will be plenty left to chew on.

Time for more coffee.

 

[butcher]

Gold in those mountains likes to travel and is broken down by the weather ice, and snow, and along with ole man nature, and his friend gravity carries the gold down the mountains along with the big rocks and boulders.

These fellers are all washed down the rivers, slowly in summer and roaring along during the cold winters, these boulders grind their way to being small round rocks and then to sands.

The soft gold banged up in its travel, decides to change its rough character, as it is carried along with the rush of the white water and moving mountains of grinding rock and stone.

If not trapped in a pocket, or crack in the crust of the earth, the gold making its way down to the bottom of the pile, not finding a pocket to hide in, or some inside bend to take a rest on, in its journey makes its way to the ocean with all the rock and rolling stones and fine sands.

Where it strolls along on the bottom of the river's bed, possibly coming to rest on the solid stone bedrock or in the clays of the previously ground up stone unless finding a pocket hole to hide in, or someplace to sit behind a big boulder, not gound to dust yet but a bit rounder resting in its journey toward the salted waters of the world.

Once finding itself in the ocean not as ions but as atoms with all of its trusty electrons as an elemental form of the metal gold, these large clusters of gold atoms still joined together is tossed around by the moving waters

The moon always making waves in the blue of the nights washes the gold up onto the beaches and carries the sands back and forth, the heavies in the group gather together and make hot spots along a beach to rest, and that is where you can go to the beach and pan for gold found along with natures natural sluice box, where the black sands and gold accumulate. Where the heavy black iron sands and heavy gold does not like to move around as easily as the white silica and quartz sands do.

Where the ole men, like me, listening to the sounds of the smashing watery waves and smelling the fish and kale, like to find a few nice shells, like to go out and sit at the beach and pan or sluice working to collect the gold, just to trade it for a bigger motor or pump or for a bigger sluice box, or shovel so we can collect more gold.

Just so we can watch it lose electrons in our lab solutions as gold ions, in order to separate the silver copper and others precipitating it out in order to make the gold purer and more shining, just to so we can rebury the gold in some other hole, till we need a little bread on that rainy day around the corner.

Now better yet, learn yourself a little knowledge about the old ancient rivers, here in those old days of the dinosaur, the ancient river beds now sitting on top of the old mountains, way up high above our modern-day river beds, those giant mountains not washed to the beaches yet, follow those round rocks sitting on top of the big hills in order to find your self some gold, packed in the conglomerates and in the ancient river bed on top of the majestic mountain.

There is gold, in them their mountains, and in those ancient river beds of round rock on top of the hills, down under the gravel of rivers and accumulated in the oceans washed up in the beach sands, you just need to learn where and learn to how to pan it out.