Extraction of gold from seawater

A. As a small-time former participant of the Celestopea Project http://celestopea.com, I can tell you that they have been quietly extracting gold and dozens of other elements from seawater since at least 2001 with the Celestopea Elemental Separators. This has been a closely guarded secret. I did not work on that part of the project which took place in the Gulf Stream, but I once saw the results as they were pulled up out of the ocean, about 12 ounces of pure gold accreted on a wire mesh with many other metals and minerals, each accreted on their own wire mesh and most in quantities much greater than the gold.

I don't know how long it took to accrete the elements or how it was done. I asked, but couldn't get anyone involved in that to give me even a hint of how it was done. I did see solar panels and wires so I think electricity is involved in some way.

I no longer have any connections with Celestopea, but as far as I know using Elemental Separators is still ongoing. Whatever method they use has to be ecologically sound as that is a principle basis of the entire project. They must do it profitably because as far as I could see this was the principle funding source for all Celestopea projects. Good luck getting anyone there to even acknowledge the existence of Elemental Separators let alone tell you anything more about how they do it. Please don't mention my name if you contact them. I probably shouldn't have made this post. To the public they are just an idea, but people involved know there's hidden substance behind the public facade. I'm not being critical of them, just stating the facts.

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Ed. note: Celestopea is associated or affiliated with the Church of Celestine Light -- nothing wrong with that. It is apparently what we previously called a "commune" or a group of communes -- nothing wrong with that. They are looking for "Angel Investors" -- nothing wrong with that. But, obviously, postings from people who don't want their names printed, but which hint of "secret" successes, could perhaps be a suggestion to invest by someone hiding their involvement -- and that should certainly be viewed with great caution.

A. You need to use Harvesters (nanobots with receptors that attach to the gold)

A. Hi, Ruchika. Ours is a fine site to get assistance with your project, but we don't put readers into private contact for a number of reasons (One of which is that this is a subject where people are very subject to being scammed). Sorry. So please simply post the same questions that you would have asked in private. Thanks.

Regards,

A. Ruchika, you may find this link interesting for your studies: www.goldmineworld.net/FindinGoldinRivers.html

I think even more productive than the oceans is downstream of panners and placers in some of the rivers of Southern Oregon and Northern California. With them stirring things up, a lot of colloidal minerals will be sent down the river.

A. Actually there is a way, but it would take a while to collect enough gold to make it worthwhile. Perhaps near shore in a gold bearing area will produce more gold.
Now the concept is much like the gold industry today with electrolysis. When on the ocean you have to make it your own sort of bucket in which you want to extract gold from, so your boat would be the anode, then you have a long pole going out (wooden would work) and have on it your cathode going into the ocean. You will want to use enough DC voltage to make the boat (anode) and your cathode be able to focus a wave on each other. Thus, the gold will collect to the cathode (which should be aluminum). Now most boats are aluminum so you would have to find a way to make the exception for the anode, which may take another pole of wood and have an anode hanging off of it as well and perhaps keep the two a few feet away from each other off the aft of the boat. The idea is to make a voltage to attract the gold to the cathode. I would just hook them up to a 12 volt battery once and see if that worked and keep the two poles about a foot apart in the ocean off the aft of the boat. Eventually after floating around for a day, I would take them out and see how much gold was attracted to them. I would not make them any larger than a foot long, perhaps 6 inches long would work better. Trial and error in this is to find which works the best. But that is how I would do it.

Good Luck.

A. We manufacture chitosan from waste crab and shrimp shells and sell the chitosan as a natural water treatment agent. It turns out that chitosan (in the insoluble flake form) is an excellent absorber of many metals including gold. Chitosan is used to recover gold from tailing ponds with much higher concentrations of gold than seawater(and no plankton either)! Interference from seawater biology makes gold extraction impractical using chitosan.

Hi, Caddy. Here's the basic current problem with electrolysis as a recovery technology: you connect a generator or battery to your electrodes and start pumping electrons from the anode to the cathode through the wiring. If a gold ion shows up at the cathode, it is reduced to gold metal. But if no gold ion is available, the water that is at the cathode is reduced to H₂^, which bubbles off into the air.

Thus, only some percentage of the electricity that you supply goes to reducing gold ions to gold metal. The efficiency approaches 100 percent when there is a lot of gold in solution, and approaches 0 percent when there is little gold in solution. When the gold is very very very dilute, the efficiency is probably 00.000...001 percent or less :-)

A good science project might be to examine the research and do some thought experiments on how you could get improved efficiency when concentrations are miniscule. Good luck.

Regards,

? Hi, Rande.

Sorry, I don't really understand what you are talking about. But, yes, electroplating already involves charge transport via "holes" in a way. The dissolved gold is a positively charged ion that migrates toward the cathode, bringing with it a deficit of electrons. It's not the same thing as silicon structures doped with electron "holes", but is somewhat related in concept. Yes, please do draw the circuit.

Regards,

A. I looked through the many questions and answers about pulling Gold from Seawater, the one that stood out was the reference to a patent pending process that would do this by pulling in large amounts of Seawater, they also say fresh water and using carbon filters and polymer resins run the cycle of raw ore water through the system, pulling out the Gold and back out from wherever their source water came from.

There are some basic problems with the whole process, as described anyway. Carbon by itself would have to be of such a density as to make the flow dynamics like sludge, much less getting through the polymer resins. Yes adding a current to the resins or the carbon if it is ionized would pull out some of the heavy metals. I'd have to run the numbers; but based on my own work in chemical engineering of water filter systems, there has to be more to it, than how they have described it in the patient document.

Some of the ideas are inventive, but the chemistry does not work in most that I looked at and those that do, like the man said concerning electroplating, the enormous energy requirements to pull out a decent amount of Gold are well above what you would be able to sell it for.

In our process with nano-materials that we are using, we weave a large filament type net, by adding a charge to the net, it pushes individual metal ions through the net lattice. As I said in my other response, we had not thought of filtering sea water, we primarily designed this to be used at Yucca mountains for nuclear waster disposal. It's expensive, but with Gold prices going up, maybe not as financial unsound as it sounds.

I do think with the surge of new nano-materials we will quickly be able to a lot of chemistry smarter than harder, as one commentary quoted that I read about.

Good luck with your individual projects....

I like the Lewis' response:

"Yes adding a current to the resins or the carbon if it is ionized would pull out some of the heavy metals. I'd have to run the numbers; but based on my own work in chemical engineering of water filter systems, there has to be more to it, than how they have described it in the patent document."

Please elaborate some more on this.I would also like to hear more about the nano fibres you mentioned.i am in the process of solving the obvious problems with the extraction which base on the trends in technology may happen in my lifetime.

Also what do you think about the Celestopean Elemental Separators mentioned earlier?

Gary

A. If I were to contemplate trying to recover gold from sea water; I would look into using flat bed linear induction motors running counter current to the sea water flow. Knowing that pure water is non-conductive, one may assume that metals, salts and ions may be restricted from flowing past the sinusoidal magnetic waves induced by the flat bed magnetic induction motors.
Perhaps by varying the strength, speed and amplitude of the waves, one could be selective of what metals, salts and ions were allowed to pass through (or not). Conductivity meters set up and downstream would assist in indicating variations in content.
Think of it as electromagnetic distillation :)

The true gold may lay in desalination via this process!

A. Extracting GOLD from Seawater. We can do it at the atomic level. Gold's vibrational frequency is 740 Kilo Hertz. We use a radio frequency device to emit that wave frequency. This vibrates the heavier gold out of seawater. We have done this in a batch process.

Yes we have filed for patents on this process and one is a Patent Cooperation Treaty Application. We can do this on a flow through process. We currently are targeting not seawater but tailings from spent Gold Mines. These are put into a fluidized bed where radio frequency is applied.

No chemicals and we can create pure water with our process. Our patent application covers not only precious metals, rare earth mineral, desalinization and treating waster water. Nobel tasks.

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Ed. note: Please advise when you get a patent number or patent application number where we can refer readers to the patent database.

A. Hi there Dwight. I am sorry to tell you Dwight, but you will never find out what you need to know on the web. You have to look for information on the subject and learn to read between the lines. Like you I was told that it impossible to refine enough nano gold to make it worthwhile. Ha Ha ha. Well I can only laugh because I have made several discoveries in relation to refining nano gold. Here is an example. I took 10 kilos of dry nano ore and refined it with water. It took me one day and I have around 500 grams of nano gold and I'm not half way finished. I can get at least 1 kilo of nano gold out of every 10 kilos of ore. The ore does not contain salt and I do not add it. I recently spilled 1 litre of water solution containing nano gold into carpet. I immediately poured salt on the carpet until the water and gold soaked into the salt then it took me around 2 hours to completely separate the gold back out of the salt. It is easier than falling from a boat into water. There is nothing technical about it. It took me around 1 year working 18 hours a day to work out how to extract nano gold from anything it is mixed with. If you have a pharmaceutical or chemical knowledge or background it will not help you break the code. I did everything I was told not too and that did not work. There is no conventional way to extract it. If I had a fully equipped lab I would never have broken the code.

A. Gold has been extracted from seawater using ion-exchange resins bearing ligands, based on sulfur. These have a highly specific affinity for gold. I don't have the references, but I looked this up some years ago using The American Chemical Society databases (which costs money for full searching and document retrieval).

However, as others have commented, the concentration of gold in sea water is so low as to make it uneconomic.

Once you start thinking about the need to move cubic kilometers of seawater over such resins, the project rapidly starts to look totally impractical. With electricity costs of pumping that much water being greater than the value of the gold obtained, how else could it be done?
If you just placed the resin in the sea close to the shore (to catch the wave/tidal motion of the water) you would have to wait a very, very long time to capture much gold floating-by in solution.

And this would not be the only problem.

A. Michael,
why use pumps? Why not use gravity? The drop from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea is fantastic! But I still think that there may be more mileage in using electromagnetic induction powered by solar energy.

 I have read somewhere that gold ions are locked in sea salt that has been evaporated from sea water and there is a way to profitably extract the gold from sea salt as it has been concentrated down. I will post a link to the article I read if I can find it. I was intrigued by fact it could be done on a small scale.
Lots of interesting approaches on here. I tend to agree that most would require more cost in energy versus the value of gold recovered.

Good Luck To All!

A. I just did some quick math on gold extracted from Sea Salt, and it doesn't look good.

Assume these basic facts:

1. 25kg bag of sea salt = $90.00
2. sea water contains on average 13 ppt (parts per trillion) of gold
3. 1000 g (1 litre) of sea water contains 35 g of sea salt
4. those 35 g of sea salt thus contain 13xE-06 g of gold
5. Gold price = $1,500 per troy oz
6. 1 Troy oz = 31 grams

For a 25 kg sack of sea salt, that would be 25000/35 x 13xE-06 gold = 9.25 mg of gold per bag

At today's price per troy oz would be

9.25 mg x $1500 / 31 g = 45 cents !!

So for each 25 kg bag which you'd process by whatever method, even with 100% yield, you'd only get 45 cents. Then you'd have to assay it and smelt it, etc, etc.

And then ... you'd have to try to get rid of the sea salt that you bought for $90 per bag! The shipping in and out; cost of all that heavy salt would kill you.

I think you're much better off digging for refundable pop bottles out of the recycle bins!!

Just to extend the math a bit more...

That 45 cents per 25kg is equivalent to about $18 per metric tonne ~= american short ton.

Commercial gold ore mining in 1974 was apparently (according to goldfever.com) 0.15 oz/ton or about $225. In 1986 this apparently dropped to 0.05 oz/ton or about $75 per ton.

If you're thinking about mining salt for gold, the economics just aren't there.

Joe.