Investigation of Copper Recovery from a New Copper Deposit (Nussir) in Northern-Norway: Thionocarbamates and Xanthate-Thionocarbamate Blend as Collectors

Abstract

Norway has newly seen an upsurge of interest in exploiting its mineral deposits influenced by fresh Government focus and survey support for previously under-prospected areas. One of the major areas of interest is a huge copper deposit, operated by Nussir ASA, located in the Repparfjord tectonic window in the Caledonides of west Finnmark. The latest mineral resource estimation is from July 2014, which states that Nussir consists of 5.8 million tonnes of indicated resources and 60.2 million tonnes of inferred resources, giving 66 million tonnes of copper ore. This paper represents the first study on processing characteristics of this ore to date. Our parallel studies using xanthates and dithiophosphates as collectors for Nussir ore flotation examined the grade and recovery of copper, silver, gold, and platinum group (PGM) minerals. Therefore, in this subsequent study, a chelating agent n-Butoxycarbonyl-O-n-butyl thionocarbamate (BBT) is used as a collector and it was found that the recovery and grades of the economically interesting minerals are improved at as low as 2 × 10−5 M collector concentration. Zeta potential, Hallimond flotation and adsorption studies were initially performed in order to assess the selective interaction of BBT and its blend with SIBX (Sodium Isobutyl xanthate) on the three copper minerals of the ore. The bench scale flotation experiments were performed using mixtures of xanthate and thionocarbamate collectors of the Nussir ore and both the resulting copper recovery and grade employing these collector mixtures is observed to be 2–8% superior to the use of a single collector system. Additionally, the current study revealed that the metallurgical results are strongly influenced by the ratio of the collectors in the mixture and particularly the sequence of the collector addition.

Mineralogical Prediction on the Flotation Behavior of Copper and Molybdenum Minerals from Blended Cu–Mo Ores in Seawater

“…This result might be caused by the absence of iron in chalcocite and covellite. The presence of various iron oxidation products in chalcopyrite and bornite has been reported to reduce the floatability of chalcopyrite and bornite [29,36,37]. The R max values of native copper and atacamite were low because native copper and atacamite are hydrophilic oxide minerals and, thus, less floatable.…”

Beneficiation Of Artvin-Cerattepe copper-zinc ore by flotation

“…These can be grouped into the families of xanthate (X), dithiophosphate (DTP), dithiocarbamates (DTC), thionocarbamate, thiocarbamate, mercapto benzothiazole (MBT) and phosphine-based collectors (Castellón et al, 2022). The different collectors (single or mixed) and their interactions on the recovery and grade for copper sulfide flotation have been studied by several researchers (Ackerman et al, 1987;Bradshaw, 1998;Bagci et al, 2007;Lotter and Bradshaw, 2010;McFadzean et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2014;Hassanzadeh and Hasanzadeh, 2016;Molaei et al, 2018;Dhar et al, 2019a;Dhar et al, 2019b;Bazmandeh and Sam, 2021).…”

Multidimensional Optimization of the Copper Flotation in a Jameson Cell by Means of Taxonomic Methods

“…With regard to copper ores, many papers discuss the problem of selecting appropriate reagents and their dosages. The use and selection of new kinds of reagents for the process was the topic of the studies presented in [7][8][9][10][11]. The introduction of seawater was presented in [12].…”