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US 11,634,788 B2Granted
Process for recovering metal
AssigneeMint Innovation Limited
InventorsWill Barker, Oliver Crush
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The invention relates to a process for recovering metals from aqueous solutions or solid feedstocks such as ores and waste. In particular, the invention relates to a method of recovering a target metal using a microorganism and recycling depleted growth media or depleted lixiviant back through the process.
Claims15
A method of recovering a target metal, the method comprising:
- (a) a dissolution step comprising dissolving the target metal from a solid feedstock material with a lixiviant to form a pregnant aqueous solution containing target metal ions;
- (b) a biosorption step comprising contacting a microorganism with the pregnant aqueous solution such that at least a portion of the target metal ions biosorb to the microorganism wherein the microorganism becomes metal laden, and the pregnant aqueous solution becomes a barren solution containing less than 5 ppm of the target metal;
- (c) a separating step comprising substantially separating the metal laden microorganism from the barren solution;
- and
- (d) a recovery step comprising recovery of the target metal from the metal laden microorganism;
- wherein at least a portion of the barren solution is returned to step (a) to be used as lixiviant for dissolving the target metal, and wherein the target metal is gold and the lixiviant solution is a halogen-based solution.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.