Oxygen is a reactant.
Is your circuit starved of it?
The Elsner equation puts oxygen on the left-hand side: 4 Au + 8 CN⁻ + O₂ + 2 H₂O. The mass optimum sits near six parts cyanide to one of oxygen, and a typical barren solution runs sixteen to thirty-three — badly oxygen-starved. That gap is the opportunity, and it closes: reach the optimum and cyanide becomes the limit, at which point more oxygen buys nothing at all. This model finds where you sit on that curve, caps the recovery gain by what is kinetically rather than mineralogically locked, and returns exactly zero when your circuit is not oxygen-limited.
The operation
Solution flow comes from the pad area actually under leach and your application rate — and the oxygen duty then follows from that flow, never the other way round. Asking for an oxygen rate independently of the water carrying it is how these models end up implying transfer concentrations that water cannot hold.
- Contained metal
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- Recovered today
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- Left in the heap
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- Solution flow
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Is oxygen actually limiting you?
This is the question the rest of the page depends on. For a cyanide circuit it is settled by the ratio of free cyanide to dissolved oxygen against the optimum near 6:1. For a copper sulfide heap it is not a solution concentration at all but how much of the ore column your air is actually reaching. If the answer is that oxygen is not your limit, this page will tell you so and stop.
- Where oxygen stops helping
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- Dissolved oxygen after treatment
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- Leach rate
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- Recovery
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- Leach cycle
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What the extra metal is worth
Credited net of what it costs to finish — incremental adsorption, elution and refining on a gold circuit, solvent extraction and electrowinning on copper — and adjusted for payable terms. Never at the gross metal price.
- Net value per unit
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- Annual reagent bill
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- Gross margin on recovered metal
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The system, and what it costs
The injector goes inline on the barren or raffinate line and the oxygenated solution reaches the pad through the drip network already there. The raffinate pumps already run, so the only new energy cost is the injector pressure drop — not a whole new circulation duty.
- Oxygen duty
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- Injector
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- Oxygen plant
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- Plant draw
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- Added pumping
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Value levers
Two of the three have no slider. Recovery and cycle time are derived from how far below its optimum your circuit is running — that is the entire point of the page, and a slider would replace the chemistry with a wish.
Sensitivity
What actually moves the answer. On a heap of any size the equipment is a rounding error against the orebody, so payback is not the interesting number here — the interesting number is whether the recovery gain is real at all.
What moves the answer
Value across kinetic share and metal price
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Take it with you
A one-page analysis for a metallurgist, a mine manager or a board — with the chemistry, the caps, the provenance of every figure and the pricing caveat attached.
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The numbers above are a planning model. These are the terms on which they are offered — they apply to every figure on this page and to the report you generate from it.