Extracting Gold from Seawater

[Anonymous]

Harold,

If my attitude offends you so much, then by all means ban me.

I see that you prefer to retain your attitude---
That's a ponderous chip you bear on your shoulder. Might be a good idea to set it down.

For the record, your attitude did not offend me, as my comments were intended to provide guidance in the behavior that is acceptable on this board, but it is doing so now. One more smart remark from you and you will, indeed, be banned. We have no room for those who can't control their mouths on this board.

Care to give it another try, with manners?

Harold

My friend, if the first response I get is a rude insult, and you turn it around accusing me of rudeness, then by all means, ban me. So, my attitude is unacceptable and yet Geo's outward insult is?

Yeah, don't bother, I'm out of here. I don't have any use for a bunch of elitist arrogant pretenders anyways. Very few have actually attempted to help. The rest are noise complaining about how "rudely" I reacted to an insult with the corresponding knee-jerk nonsense.

Just curious, how many here have actually attempted, even at a lab scale, to extract Gold from seawater? If you have not done it, that means you have not looked at the economics yourself. And yet, you are so convinced you are right based on what "others" have posted. Talk about a herd sheep-like mentality.



Sayonara. (just go ahead and delete my email from your database, OK?)

 

[patnor1011]

Harold,

If my attitude offends you so much, then by all means ban me.

I see that you prefer to retain your attitude---
That's a ponderous chip you bear on your shoulder. Might be a good idea to set it down.

For the record, your attitude did not offend me, as my comments were intended to provide guidance in the behavior that is acceptable on this board, but it is doing so now. One more smart remark from you and you will, indeed, be banned. We have no room for those who can't control their mouths on this board.

Care to give it another try, with manners?

Harold

My friend, if the first response I get is a rude insult, and you turn it around accusing me of rudeness, then by all means, ban me. So, my attitude is unacceptable and yet Geo's outward insult is?

Yeah, don't bother, I'm out of here. I don't have any use for a bunch of elitist arrogant pretenders anyways. Very few have actually attempted to help. The rest are noise complaining about how "rudely" I reacted to an insult with the corresponding knee-jerk nonsense.

Just curious, how many here have actually attempted, even at a lab scale, to extract Gold from seawater? If you have not done it, that means you have not looked at the economics yourself. And yet, you are so convinced you are right based on what "others" have posted. Talk about a herd sheep-like mentality.



Sayonara. (just go ahead and delete my email from your database, OK?)

Point is you did not either yet you do want to convince us your numbers from somewhere in internet are holy grail. What makes you so convinced based on numbers from one obscure article? Isn't that blind sheep mentality?
All you do is come here asking for free lunch. You are either dreaming or got gold fever my friend, I have seen many like you. They always come with attitude, convinced about their own truth, get angry and then go back from where they came from.
You should get together with dr Poe, I am sure both of you will have a lot in common.

 

[patnor1011]

Folks, I realize that this topic has probably been discussed before but I could not find good threads when searching for it here. Also, I realize that many people will instinctively say that it is "uneconomical" to extract gold from seawater, but I believe my situation may make it economical, so please hear me out.

I am an Electrical Engineer and I have developed a way to pump seawater using renewable energy - specifically using the waves themselves to power my pump. The primary purpose of the pumped seawater is to power the hydroturbines on shore to generate electricity. I already have engineering designs made up for a 3-5MW power plant using this method.

This power plant will pump a total of about 3-5 cubic meters/second of seawater. After powering the hydroturbines, I have to discharge this amount of sea water back to the sea - UNLESS, I can make use of it for further economic gain.

The best idea I am considering is to extract gold and other precious metals from this existing seawater flow.

Many people said that gold extraction is uneconomical because of the amount of sea water one has to pump to shore. The energy involved in pumping so much seawater would make it uneconomical. But what if, the pumping cost is zero, I am already pumping for my hydroturbine using renewable energy, I can deliver this amount of seawater flow for free. All of a sudden, the energy equation becomes favorable, probably leading to a favorable economic situation.

Knowing this fact, how would one go about in building a contraption to extract gold from this amount of seawater flow (5m3/s)?

I was thinking of using some electrolysis method using carbon anodes to extract the gold. Can anybody suggest a better method? Even if you don't have all the details, it would help me further in my research.

I appreciate any and all inputs. I may be an electrical engineer, but I am ignorant of any methods (electrolysis or otherwise) for extracting gold from seawater.

If an economical method can be adapted to my power plants, this would be huge economically and I would be willing to partner with companies and individuals in bringing this to full market penetration. I plan to build about 300 power plant just here in the Philippines alone, so this could be huge.

Jojo

 

[g_axelsson]

My friend, I appreciate your answers to me. I am in no wise trying to argue just because I am argumentative.

I believe it boils down to the original assumptions. You say the concentration is .006mg/m3, I am working from .1mg/m3 figure. If your figure is correct, extraction would be uneconomical. If my figure is correct, extraction would probably border on being favorable considering the water flow is free.

I have read that concentrations in the western pacific area, (the area of my interest) is higher than other oceanic locations. I believe this has something to do with the volcanoes in our Pacific Rim of Fire area where the Philippines is.

Is it possible that my figures are correct due to this. If it is, would you acknowledge that extraction might be feasible?

Jojo

I give up... several members and me too have given you the numbers, made the calculations and given several arguments to why it is not feasible to extract gold from seawater economically and still you cling to your one number that is off by a factor of 1000 from every other source, including their own numbers.

There is a reason that none of us have even tried to extract gold. We do the math first to see what is feasible. There are so many sources of gold, some economically, some not. Do the math and decide what to pursuit. Sometimes we do it just for fun or to learn a new technique but we don't get blinded by an irrational love for gold.

I will give you a final answer on your last question.

No and No.

Göran

 

[kurtak]

5. The remaining high cost item would be the electrolysis energy needed. Do you have any idea how much this will cost?


Jojo

Jojo

the amount of energy has more value as energy sent down the line & out to the power grid then the value of the gold recovered if that energy was used to try to recover the gold --- its that simple

I believe that is what the others are trying to tell you - these guys are "tops" in their field - this has been discussed here before & they have crunched the numbers - they know what they are talking about

Getting mad because you are not hearing the answer you want to hear is not going to change the facts --- it is only going to result in your being banned --- & you have been warned of this by the man that has the authority to do it --- so you can ether cool your jets & stick around & learn something form these guys that are "tops" in their fields - or find your self gone & still wondering "what if" with no one to help with the answers

Kurt

 

[goldsilverpro]

Is this useful?

First of all, where are you getting your numbers? When Nazi Germany was looking for money, they investigated gold in seawater. Fritz Haber, a top Nazi chemist that won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1918, went around the world collecting seawater samples. All in all, he analyzed 5000 samples and determined the the gold concentration to be an average of .008 mg/ton, about 125 times less than the .001g/ton they expected. At .008mg/ton (.0088mg/m3), your 432,000 gallons would only contain about 3.8g of gold. On the internet, there are lots of different numbers concerning the gold concentration in seawater. Although it was a long time ago and the equipment wasn't as good, I would consider the Haber number more valid than the others.

________________________________________________________________

If you have a gold plating solution that contains 1 tr.oz. of gold per gallon, the plating efficiency will be close to 100%. Assuming the gold has a valence of +3, 100% would be 2.449 grams of gold depositing on the cathode per amp, per hour.

As the gold concentration approaches zero, the efficiency also approaches zero. To be reduced on the cathode, the gold ion must be in intimate contact with the cathode. As the population of gold ions decreases, there are not enough gold ions in contact with the cathode, at any given time, to consume all of the amperage that's being applied. The excess amperage has to do something. It might split water or react with other chemicals in the seawater. When the gold is down to, say, 0.01g/l, the efficiency might be down to, say, 2%, and that might be conservative. In other words, only 2% of the amperage is depositing gold and 98% is doing something else. It would take 50 times more amperage to deposit a gram of gold from a 2% efficient solution than it would from a 100% efficient solution.

At a seawater concentration of .0088mg/m3, that would be .0000000088g/l. At that concentration, the efficiency would be almost non-existent. I would not be surprised if it was as low as one millionth of 1%. If so, it would take 100,000,000 amps for 1 hour to get the same 2.449g.

I've been plating gold, in one form or another, since 1966. When recovering gold by electrolysis, I usually was able to analyze the final effluent by AA. I have never seen a solution that was totally barren of gold after extended electrolysis. There was always at least .001g/l of gold remaining. If it wouldn't plate out at that level, it surely wouldn't plate out of a solution 113,000 times weaker.

Please elaborate on why you think it would take 100,000,000 amps for 1 hour.

I was thinking that I would apply <1.5volts to prevent electrolyzing the water. At these voltage level, only the metals would accumulate on the electrodes. Am I wrong in this assumption?

If only metals would accumulate, I don't think the current would be that high - I am assuming it would be a few amps, maybe even less. Am I wrong in making this assumption? (Note that I am saying this not as a challenge to your knowledge, but as an honest genuine question. I really don't know how much current is needed.)

Jojo

The amperage is what deposits the gold. According to Faraday's law, applying 1 amp for 1 hour will deposit 2.449g of valence 3 gold, at 100% efficiency. Five amps for 3 hours will deposit 5 X 3 X 2.449 = 36.735g at 100% efficiency. If the efficiency is, say, only .01%, 5A for 3 hours will deposit 36.735 X .0001 = .003675g. The whole point of my post was the "efficiency". The lower the efficiency, the higher the amperage will be needed to deposit the same amount of gold.

To deposit the gold as metal, the gold ions must essentially be touching the cathode (or at least be in the cathode film layer, which is microscopically thin). Any gold ion that does not touch the cathode will not deposit. Also, if the seawater is flowing through the system at great speeds, very few gold ions will make contact. This, along with the very low gold concentration, will result in extremely low efficiency. It would take extremely large amounts of amperage to deposit very small amounts of gold.

All I have written so far assumes a solution of gold only. With the 60, or more, other things that are in saltwater, who knows what would happen? It would surely make the situation worse. And we haven't even discussed filtration yet.

All in all, I doubt if any of the gold would deposit. If it does, it would probably be immeasurable.

 

[butcher]

First, I wish to comment on my friend Patnor's postings as of late, Pat I am very impressed at how well your English has improved, I have always learned a lot from you.

JoJo,
Like most new miners to gold, what you seem to have is gold fever, it is a terrible disease, it can make a man lose reality, seeking, working and dreaming, himself to the poor house, blinding him to reality, or the truth, that he does not wish to see, by his blindness of that yellow glow of the metal.

There is some gold dissolved in the ocean, but trying to remove it from the water is a challenge that will be not be economically feasible, that fact has been proven.

You have been given some very good reasons why, and some very good suggestions, the forum members have tried to be helpful and polite, and have given you several good reasons why what your trying to do is just impossible, you cannot extract gold economically from the ocean, this is not to say you could not get a little gold as a byproduct from mining some other commodity from the water like salt and bromine and recovering the metals as a byproduct.

You need to spend some time studying and experimenting with electrolysis, and the subject you are asking about, to be able to understand why you have been getting the answers you have, and spend some time studying recovery of metals from solutions using the electrolytic methods, then go back and read GSP's post to understand what he is saying, basically unless you concentrated the gold in the solution, what you propose cannot be done economically, and the way you seem to be describing how you wish to do it, it cannot be done at all.

I do not see where you have done any study on this subject, you may have gotten the idea and read a few pages on the internet (much of which is misinformation), but you have not studied this subject to understand the nuts and bolts of it.
I have to admit I have not studied enough of how to recover gold from ocean water, but I have studied enough of the subjects, around this, and the of recovery of gold, to see the futility in trying to recover gold from this source, unless it was a byproduct of some other mineral recovery of the salts of the ocean, to purify those salts.

Just because there is gold in a mountain or in the ocean does not mean mining for it would be worthwhile.

Many a prospectors and miner have been scammed, and cheated, (many more than have been successful), because of their blindness of the gold fever, they wish to believe what they want, even sometimes when the truth is clearly visible they do not see it, or wish to see it, they cannot see past the golden glass over their eyes, they hold off on their dream the gold is there and they are the ones who will retrieve it, until they die a poor man with that gold fever never wanting to see the truth.

 

[Justincase]

Is it possible the sea has acted just like any other solution and dropped all it's value to the bottom.
We did spend rather a lot of time in the 40's filling it with hundred's of metric tun's of steel,which is still there and slowly degrading so why any one would expect it to have any thing more than our own waste is amazing.
I would like to see data from samples from earlier dates(may be able to use thing's like sea salt used for embalming and mummification.),it would have no real value but it would be interesting to see what impact we had had..

 

[Harold_V]

My friend,

You got that wrong, too. I am not your friend, nor would I choose you as one. You are also no longer a registered member of this board.

I found it strange that unless readers agreed with his every point, they were rude.

Armed with that thought, I have concluded that he didn't come here for information, he came here for confirmation, which is something that must be earned through performance. Anything that did not agree with his assumptions was rejected. I am finished with allowing him to keep the board off balance.

Harold

 

[subhajit_waugh]

Sea water contains about 0.1-2 mg/tonne of gold dissolved in water (average 1 mg/tonne). But considering the amount of seawater available, it is a really huge goldmine! Theoretically fine, but problems were practical (which prevented profitable extraction till now). This can however become possible with the old electrolysis technique, with the only difference that the voltage difference between the electrodes must be maintained slightly less than the minimum potential difference required for electrolysis of water (yes, there is a minimum pot. difference, say 1.23 volts, below which water won't be hydrolyzed. But since gold lies below hydrogen in electrochemical series, it will get deposited on the cathode!). Since it is impractical to pump millions of gallons of water, it is more practical to move the electrodes over vast regions of oceans. This process can be made much more profitable by another simple process (which I explain later).

With a slight modification, the propellers of ships can be designed to form the electrodes! Each of the 3 blades will be a stack of 3 blades (like a sandwich) with the sandwiched blade maintained +ve and the other two forming cathode (of course they won't be touching each other. There will be a gap of a few cm between each blade, supported by rubber/cork). The tilt of each blades will be much less than conventional propeller, so that it makes much more revolution per advancement, and hence scan the volume of water more effectively. It is practical to make each blade 1.7 meter in length, so that cross sectional area of circle formed on revolution of blades will be 10 meter square. This will scan 10 tonne of water per 1 meter moved by the ship. Considering that efficiency of extraction is only 0.1 mg/tonne, it comes to 1 mg/meter of distance covered (or 1 gram per k.m. or 1 k.g gold per 1000 k.m.) So, this may not be profitable if ship is designed only for gold hunt. But it can be a real bonus for commercial ships which has to cover thousands of k.m. anyway.
This process can be made much more profitable by another simple process.
Consider this practical concept: there are 3 primary ways of separating U235 from U238. Forget the diffusion & centrifugal processes. 3rd method: You shine a laser light of exactly matching wavelength to selectively excite U235 (it is easy nowadays, since we wave Cu vapor laser & dye-lasers for fine tuning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_vapor_laser_isotope_separation
PLAN: Just like a Sodium vapor lamp, or Copper vapor lamp/laser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_vapor_laser) it is possible to make a gold vapor lamp, which will selectively excite Au ions, thus requiring even lesser voltage (I believe it will be lesser than the critical voltage which starts breaking H2O into Hydrogen & oxygen). This process/step is critical because as the concentration of ions (Au in this case) start decreasing, the voltage required to extract starts increasing. But selective excitation should help a lot. And besides, it will help to dissociate (charge) neutral covalently bonded gold-monohydroxide.
[Let me explain and elaborate about the gold vapor light. It can be built using same technique as that of a copper vapor lamp. Actually, copper vapor laser is one of the few lasers that can be home built!
Since using pure gold vapor lamp is difficult to construct, because of the extremely high temperature, necessary to create gold vapor, therefore, gold halides, like gold chloride or gold bromide or gold iodide may be substituted, since they form vapors at much lower temperatures]

 

[jimdoc]

Are you friends with the welder guy?

 

[g_axelsson]

A pipe dream.

Göran

 

[niks neims]

Sorry for the off-topic, but since this thread is unlikely to ever be taken seriously maybe it is ok....

Reading this thread just made me really really sad again that Harold is gone... :/... And it is not the first time...

So what is the deal guys, it was really bugging me and after doing a tiny bit of research i understand there was a little unpleasantnes back in 2016 over few sensitive questions... But what happened? Did he just got mad and left? Did Noxx fire him? I understand he is still alive and well (dawkins willing!), eaven keeping online presence at other forums, just not coming here? Was there ever attempt to get him back? Where do things stand?


The reason i am asking is because while lurking forum these few last weeks, reading stickied, referenced, old threads it was impossible not to feel harolds presence and i grew very acustomed to it... Many times just reading some users post i could feel in my gut - you just wait buddy, when Harold reads what crap you are spewing- and shure enough, few posts down the line there he was, magnificent in his just fury, armed with dictionary and phrases fit for a poet... For me, as a non-native english speaker almost each his post was a treat to read... Not to mention his handling of unruly members... Some of these dramas rivaled TV shows in terms of excitement...

Shure he was a little set in his ways, and you could tell, in real life he is a bit of an ******* (Who isnt?), and sometimes, maybe just maybe there was a hint of absolute power corrupting him, maaaaaybe a little megalomania (dude, please dont Ban me, if you ever come back, you know...)

But from my point of view i can truly say, as a moderator he was as effective as unique, and could be one of few great persons that made this forum so succesfull... Regarding his moderating abilities maybe eaven the top person... Of course he was also one of the best Regarding his skill as a refiner and willingness to share his knowledge also, but there is some steep competition there... Not going to mention anyone, u guys know Who you are, not trying to suck up (well just to harold )...

So I guess what i am wondering is, if i get `the feels` every time i see some old posts of harolds just from studying forum history... How do you, regular guys, feel knowing he is no longer part of this forums life? And i cant help but feel a little bit nostalgic as if with his passing this forum has lost something very beautiful and irreplaceble....

You know... No ****...

 

[jimdoc]

Harold said he may check in on the forum some day.
My guess is that will be if and when he is damn good and ready to.
I would say we all miss him, but I guess there are some that don't.
I don't know what happened. There are a few mysteries here on the forum.
Maybe this forum was a habit that had him just losing his time, with no real gain.
He is getting things done. Priorities change all the time, for everybody.

 

[butcher]

Harold was one of a kind.

It is my belief we would not have the forum, or its values we do today, if it was not for him.
The monkeys would have ran the zoo, I feel many of us learned more than just refining metals from him, I did anyway.

I emailed him recently, He was doing good enjoying life.

 

[Justincase]

Harold said he may check in on the forum some day.
My guess is that will be if and when he is damn good and ready to.

May be he already has.
It seems to have become quite fashionable to change one's I.D.
I would think it would be quite amusing for him just to observe.

 

[4metals]

Harold is not the type to change his ID and just lurk in the wings. He is still a moderator with all of the powers and privileges that come with being a moderator (believe me the list is short!). He is well respected here, as he should be, and there is nothing being done to inhibit his return. His absence is, to the best of my knowledge, voluntary on his part.

 

[jimdoc]

Harold is not the type to change his ID and just lurk in the wings.

I agree 100%

 

[Justincase]

it is an old tradition.
Even Napoleon was rumored to dress as a private and walk amongst his troop's so he could better understand their moral.
Old habits die very hard if some one has logged on every day for years they will lightly still log on even if they do not feel comfortable to post.

 

[anachronism]

Nope

Harold's not built that way.