Nobel Prize winner Sir Fraser Stoddart hopes to turn gold mines green

gold bars

A British Nobel Prize winner is hoping to revolutionise the mining industry with a new technique for extracting gold that does away with poisonous cyanide.

Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Scottish-born scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2016, is behind a new start-up that is testing a starch-based method of separating gold from ore.

The “serendipitous discovery” by Sir Fraser’s research team at Northwestern University in Chicago is being developed by his company Cycladex in Nevada.

Sir Fraser Stoddart
Sir Fraser Stoddart

The technique uses a hydrogen peroxide-based substance that combines with a cornstarch-derived compound to extract gold at ambient temperatures.

Cycladex believes its technique is cheaper than current methods and could eventually replace the cyanide leaching process that has been used in most gold mines for the last 120 years.

“It’s a very much greener way of extracting gold,” said Sir Fraser. “Almost inevitably it’s my hope as a person concerned about the environment that this will put increasing pressure on the gold industry to move away from cyanide use.”

Cyanide has been blamed for contaminating waterways and poisoning wildlife.

Sir Fraser said he was confident his technique stood “a pretty good chance of becoming the new method” industry-wide. “That’s my dream,” he said.

Cycladex has won a $1m grant from the National Science Foundation in the US and is now working with Comstock, one of the world’s oldest gold mining companies, on a trial that could move to a commercial scale with 18 months.

gold mine

The company is now looking for further partners, and has also teamed up with a miner in Slovakia, where the use of cyanide is banned.

Sir Fraser, who recently met with both Barack Obama and Chinese premier Li Keqiang to discuss his work, said the chance discovery of the technique showed the importance of allowing scientists to pursue research without being set onerous goals.

“Politicians think they can tell the science community what to target,” he said. “More funding that is given with much less direction would in the fullness of time - provided it went to research groups with good track records - be very much more productive for society in general.”

The Nobel Prize winner’s collaborator is Roger Pettman, a former research student of his, who developed non-stick, biodegradable chewing gum, and now serves as Cycladex’s chief executive.

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