Extract silver from ore, win $10,000,000
Scott says:
LinkBarrick Gold has a problem. It's got a whop of silver in Argentina, but it's tapped in silica-encapsulated ore. If you can "unlock the value" -- ie figure out a way to economically boost their current 6.7 per cent recovery rate -- they'll give you a cool $10 mil. Kinda like the X Prize, only underground.
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Silver melts at a lower temperature than silica. Throw the stuff into a big oven, heat and strain off.
Also, I don't want no 10mil. I want residuals from all the silver you guys recover. 10% for the life of the mine should be good.
Dragonphyre, if you read http://www.unlockthevalue.com/SilverRecovery.aspx you'll see that the silver is fully embedded in the silica. If you melt only the silver, you get nowhere, you just have melty silver chocolate chips in a silica cookie. And at 16 grams of silver per ton of ore, you can't melt all the silica and recover the energy costs to heat a ton of ore to 2577 F. The real challenge here is to find a way to reduce the silica to ultrafine particles without a direct mechanical grinding operation, which has already proven to be prohibitively difficult due to tool wear.
You are right... I didn't RTFA... Now I did, and I have concluded that it isn't worth it.
As you noted, the 1 ton of the silica per 16 grams of ore, it simply isn't worth it. Silver has a value of about $12USD per ounce, which 16g is about half an ounce. So you are going to have to find a way of processing a ton of ore using less than $6USD of man-hours, equipment, chemicals, etc. etc.
Not possible. At least not by me. But then again, I am not a geological engineer. If there even is such a thing...
Publicize the prize (BoingBoinged -- so far so good). Sell small rock samples for home experimenters via an Ebay "Buy-it-now" Store, at (pre-shipping) $1 per ~100g sample, or $5 for 10 -- this is about 1000 times the value of the silver. Wait for some budding mad scientist to get clever; break even meanwhile.
Extracting the silver is less important than extracting the value of the silver. =)
Yeah. I was kind of interested until I hit that 16 grams per ton figure. Man. I'd rather stay here at home in Puerto Rico and extract iron from the beach sand. (Magnetite, actually. Very fun to take a nice little rare-earth magnet to the beach and sort the sand grains with it.)