Post: How a Quiet Chemical Program May Become Mining’s Most Disruptive Breakthrough

What started as an exploratory search for new ligands evolved into RZOLV’s five-component, low-pH formula—now demonstrating that modern metallurgy can deliver high recoveries without cyanide’s environmental cost.

By Duane Nelson, President & CEO, RZOLV Technologies Inc - December 7th, 2025

For more than a century, gold extraction has been defined by a single molecule: cyanide. It is efficient, cheap, and deeply entrenched—and it is also toxic, tightly regulated, and increasingly incompatible with the environmental standards of a modern mining industry.

For decades, scientists have searched for a cleaner chemistry that could match cyanide’s performance without its consequences. Most attempts failed. Some worked only under idealized lab conditions. Others collapsed when exposed to the unpredictable mineralogy of real ore. And for years, the consensus held firm: there was no scalable, non-toxic alternative that could rival cyanide in both recovery and cost.

What few outside a small group of metallurgists knew, however, was that a quiet chemistry program—humble in appearance, but ambitious in scope—had been steadily building an answer.

Literally Years in the Making

RZOLV did not emerge from a single flash of insight or a lucky laboratory accident. It materialized slowly, shaped by years of disciplined experimentation, computational pattern recognition, and pilot-scale testing—much of it carried out quietly alongside other research programs. The team wasn’t trying to reinvent gold extraction; they were trying to understand the limits of the chemistry the industry relied on. Their question was simple but radical: What happens in the places where cyanide fails? As one early scientist recalls, “We weren’t interested in copying cyanide. We were interested in all the ores cyanide fails on.” That curiosity—directed at the blind spots of a century-old process—became the spark that ultimately led to one of the industry’s most unexpected breakthroughs. That’s where the real opportunity was hiding.” These “failure windows” were well known:

• low-grade ores with high sulfide demand

• refractory and semi-refractory mineral systems

• gravity concentrates with complex gangue interactions

• high sulfide flotation concentrates

• complex copper/gold deposits

• tailings containing legacy reagents and unpredictable chemistry

• ores rich in carbonaceous matter or competing adsorption sites

Each represented billions of tonnes of bypassed gold—material written off because cyanide simply could not perform in those conditions.

To tackle this, the team built a testing regime almost monastic in its discipline. Thousands of dissolution experiments were performed. More than thousands of ligand and oxidant combinations were trialed. Algorithms clustered favorable kinetic behaviors. Every promising formulation was pushed, strained, and broken until the chemistry revealed what made it stable—or unstable—under real operating conditions.

Patterns emerged. Most alternative lixiviants relied on high ORP environments, harsh oxidizers, or unstable ligands that degraded under heat, air, or agitation. Cyanide’s dominance wasn’t just historical—it was practical.

But slowly, the data pointed toward a completely different operating window.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

Against conventional thinking, the team found that gold dissolution could be driven effectively in a low-pH electrochemical regime—a region where cyanide chemistry collapses. The insight was counterintuitive: instead of pushing oxidation harder, the system became more stable and more selective when oxidation was controlled, buffered, and moderated.

This discovery laid the foundation for what would become RZOLV’s five-component reagent system, engineered not for force but for precision. The formulation prevented passivation films from forming on gold surfaces. It resisted degradation. It held a stable oxidation potential even in the presence of sulfides and iron. It minimized side reactions and consistently produced clean, predictable dissolution curves.

It wasn’t just new chemistry. - It was a new class of hydrometallurgy.

From Laboratory Curiosity to Industrial Contender

The real proving ground came when RZOLV advanced beyond grams and beakers into tonne-scale engineering. Historically, this is where lixiviants fail—when flow rates, carbon contact, impurity buildup, and mechanical forces expose flaws no lab protocol can simulate. Instead, RZOLV held.

In early pilot runs and now in its 100-tonne commercial test program, the chemistry displayed a rare combination of traits:

• rapid initial gold mobilization

• stable ORP across extended leach cycles

• minimal sulfide interference

• strong carbon loading and adsorption isotherms

• clean, efficient carbon stripping using conventional circuits

• doré smelting with no modifications required

The reagent didn’t just dissolve gold; it moved through the entire gold production chain—from ore to solution, from solution to carbon, from carbon to electrowinning, and finally into doré bars—without introducing a single new bottleneck.

For operators, this means something extraordinarily valuable: a drop-in alternative that avoids the million-dollar redesigns or multi-year permitting challenges associated with cyanide.

A Breakthrough Hiding in Plain Sight

The mining sector is not known for easy transitions. Technologies can take decades to gain trust, and many promising alternatives stall before reaching meaningful scale. But as global jurisdictions tighten cyanide regulations—and as companies reevaluate the ESG and financial risks tied to toxic chemistry—RZOLV enters the market at a rare moment when change is not only welcome but necessary.

What began as an exploratory chemistry exercise has become a commercially ready reagent system that performs where cyanide cannot, integrates where cyanide already operates, and resolves the environmental liabilities cyanide creates. In short:

RZOLV doesn’t just replace cyanide. It expands the gold industry’s possibilities.

A decade ago, the idea of a non-toxic, high-performance gold leach would have sounded like wishful thinking. Today, with industrial-scale validation underway, it looks more like the beginning of a new chapter—one written not by accident, but by data, persistence, and engineering discipline.

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Disclosure and Cautionary Statement

This article has been published by RZOLV Technologies Inc. as part of its corporate communications and investor relations activities and reflects the views and opinions of management as of the date of publication. It is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy securities. Certain statements in this article may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially. Readers should not place undue reliance on such statements. The Company’s officers, directors, and insiders may hold securities of RZOLV and therefore have a financial interest in the Company’s performance. Readers are encouraged to review RZOLV’s public disclosure documents available on SEDAR+ for a discussion of material risks and assumptions. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider has reviewed or approved the contents of this article.