Five signs your CIP circuit is leaving gold on the table
Recovery losses rarely announce themselves. They show up as a slow, quiet drift in your reconciliation figures — a percent here, half a percent there — until a quarter closes short and nobody can point to the cause.
Recovery losses rarely announce themselves. They show up as a slow, quiet drift in your reconciliation figures — a percent here, half a percent there — until a quarter closes short and nobody can point to the cause.
The first sign is carbon inventory drift. If your carbon concentration in the lead tank has fallen below design without anyone topping up, gold is passing through adsorption stages that no longer have the surface area to catch it.
The second is screen blinding on the interstage screens. Blinded screens short-circuit slurry, reduce residence time, and quietly push soluble gold to tails.
Third, watch your elution efficiency. Barren carbon returning to the circuit above 150 g/t means every adsorption stage is starting from a handicap.
Fourth is cyanide and oxygen profiling across the tanks. A leach that is oxygen-starved in the first two tanks will never recover downstream.
Fifth, and most common, is simply not sampling often enough to see any of the above. A weekly profile across every stage costs very little and pays for itself the first time it catches a drift early.
