The Next Gold Rush Starts with Better Recovery...
Oct 14, 2026 | RZL, Sophic Capital
Processing methods and opportunities for improved metal recovery - More Metal Will Need to Come from Better Recovery, Not Just More Mining
Gold mining has a processing problem, and the next mining capex cycle should reward recovery efficiency as much as new production. World Gold Council placed 2025 mine production at 3,672 tonnes and the annual average gold price at US$3,431/oz, implying roughly US$405 billion of mine output at the annual average price. Total gold demand exceeded US$555 billion. As global mine production remains near record levels and gold prices continue to climb, hundreds of billions of dollars of gold are produced each year using processing technologies that have evolved far less dramatically than the value of the metal being recovered.
For more than a century, cyanide has been the dominant chemistry used to extract gold. Cyanide is proven, relatively inexpensive, well understood and supported by decades of infrastructure and operating experience. For conventional free-milling ores, particularly oxide deposits, it is one of the most effective gold-recovery technologies available, which is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Once a mine has been permitted, engineered and optimized around cyanide, operators have little reason to change chemistry simply because a new alternative exists. A new process therefore needs to do one of two things: deliver a clearly better total-process outcome or unlock additional materials (and value) that the incumbent process cannot efficiently serve.
When cyanide is not the best solution, the challenge can be technical, economic or regulatory. Copper can consume cyanide; sulfides can encapsulate gold; carbonaceous material can re-adsorb dissolved gold; concentrates may require distant third-party treatment; tailings can retain residual metal; and in some jurisdictions cyanide itself can complicate permitting, transport or community acceptance. The opportunity is therefore not necessarily to replace cyanide. It is to expand the amount of mineral resource that can be economically and responsibly recovered beyond cyanide’s most effective operating window.
This report examines where today’s gold-processing flowsheets work well, where they become less efficient, and why those gaps matter economically. Our conclusion is that the opportunity lies less in replacing cyanide than in expanding the processing envelope across copper-gold ores, refractory material, concentrates, tailings and cyanide-sensitive jurisdictions. The same recovery theme may also create adjacent opportunities in critical-mineral co-recovery and secondary resources.
How Gold Is Recovered Today: Cyanide Works – Within the Right Ore Body
Gold extraction is fundamentally a metallurgical problem: the mineralogy determines the economic flowsheet. For straightforward oxide deposits, cyanide heap leaching or conventional CIL/CIP circuits can deliver strong recovery with relatively simple infrastructure.
But not every deposit is straightforward. Increasingly complex ores and secondary resources create important “failure windows” for conventional cyanidation.
Exhibit 1: Cyanide market and processing challenges
Source: Company Reports
Copper-Gold Deposits: When Another Valuable Metal Becomes a Processing Problem
Gold frequently occurs alongside copper, but some copper minerals also dissolve in cyanide, consuming reagent, forming copper-cyanide complexes and increasing downstream recovery and detoxification requirements.
At higher copper concentrations, mines may add infrastructure such as SART (sulphidization, acidification, recycling and thickening) to recover copper and regenerate cyanide. It works, but adds equipment, reagents, process control, operating complexity and cost.
The result is unusual: valuable copper can make gold more difficult and expensive to recover, creating an opening for sequential processes that treat copper first and gold second.
Refractory Gold and Pretreatment: The Gold Is There – Cyanide Just Cannot Reach It
Refractory gold is difficult not because cyanide cannot react with gold, but because it often cannot reach it. Microscopic gold can be trapped inside sulfide minerals such as pyrite and arsenopyrite, requiring oxidation or other pretreatment before leaching.
Refractory deposits are not an insignificant niche subset of the market. McKinsey estimates that refractory ores represent approximately 24% of global gold reserves and 22% of gold resources. It also found that recently developed and planned pressure-oxidation projects require roughly 48% more capital per tonne of ore capacity than regular tank-leach plants. That does not mean one-quarter of annual gold production is refractory; it does show that a material share of the future resource base sits behind more complex and often more capital-intensive processing requirements.
Commercial pretreatment options include pressure oxidation, roasting, biological oxidation, ultrafine grinding and other oxidative or thermal approaches. These are established but can be capital intensive and operationally complex; no alternative leach chemistry eliminates the need to first expose physically encapsulated gold.
One additional cost can arise from the chemistry transition itself. Pressure oxidation and other refractory pretreatment routes can operate under acidic conditions, while conventional cyanidation requires an alkaline circuit. Neutralizing between those stages can add lime demand, gypsum generation and handling complexity. An alternative gold-recovery chemistry that can work downstream of acidic pretreatment could therefore create value by simplifying the transition – not by eliminating pretreatment.
The opportunity for new chemistry can therefore sit downstream of pretreatment. If oxidation already occurs under acidic conditions, a gold-recovery process that can function in that environment could simplify the flowsheet. The same issue can emerge as a mine deepens from oxidized near-surface material into more sulphide-rich or transitional ore, changing recovery, reagent consumption and the required flowsheet. The opportunity is not to eliminate metallurgy, but to build a better flowsheet around it.
Gold Concentrate Processing: Mining the Gold Is Only Half the Job
Not every mine produces gold bars. Many operations produce a gold-bearing concentrate that must be transported to a smelter or specialized processor. More than 15% of global primary gold production is contained in concentrates, representing over 500 tonnes of annual gold. Producers can face treatment and refining charges, freight, moisture and assay adjustments, payable-metal deductions and penalties for deleterious elements. Because those terms are highly feed-, process- and contract-specific, there is no single industry-wide value-loss percentage. But the scale is material: at the 2025 average gold price, more than 500 tonnes of annual contained gold represents over US$55 billion of gross metal value before deductions, meaning even modest improvements in realized value can be economically significant.
The commercial question is whether a producer should keep shipping concentrate to a third party or recover more metal near the mine. Large operations may still favour the conventional route, while smaller, remote or difficult deposits may benefit from modular hydrometallurgical processing.
Adoption also matters: a technology that can use familiar tanks, pumps, carbon circuits or electrowinning equipment may be easier to evaluate than one requiring an entirely new plant architecture.
Tailings and Spent Heap Leach Pads: Yesterday’s Waste Is Becoming Today’s Resource
Mining has already spent enormous capital extracting, crushing and processing material that still contains metal. Historically, residual tailings grades were often too low to justify retreatment. Three things are changing that equation: higher gold prices, improving processing technology and greater attention to tailings liabilities.
Historical tailings, spent heap-leach pads, stockpiles and other legacy materials can contain residual gold, silver, copper and other metals. Much of the material has already been mined, crushed, moved and placed at surface; the question is whether enough residual value remains to justify another processing campaign. Tailings retreatment is already a commercial industry. The opportunity can be especially attractive where incremental recovery also helps offset remediation, water-management or closure costs.
That brownfield logic extends to spent heaps and legacy pads. Mining Intelligence identifies 286 currently producing heap-leach operations across commodities. Much of the mining, crushing and stacking has already been paid for, yet residual gold and copper can remain. If fresh solution can reach under-leached zones and a different chemistry can recover the metal economically, the material may gain a second operating life.
S&P Global estimates that approximately 131 billion tonnes of tailings were generated globally from 1991 through 2025; 23% came from primary gold mines, implying roughly 30 billion tonnes of modern-era gold-mine tailings. This is a physical inventory, not an economically recoverable resource, but it illustrates the scale of material already mined and processed that may warrant re-evaluation as prices, technology and remediation priorities change. The Global Tailings Review estimates roughly 8,500 active, inactive and closed tailings facilities worldwide, excluding abandoned facilities, while academic reviews place the historic global total in the range of roughly 29,000 – 35,000 facilities.
Exhibit 2: Illustrative Scale of Gold Related Residues
Source: Company Reports
Combining the roughly 30 billion tonnes of modern-era gold-mine tailings with approximately 10 billion tonnes of existing gold heap material, implies an above-ground physical universe on the order of 40 billion tonnes. This is not a mineral resource, reserve or recoverable tonnage estimate. It is simply a scale reference for material where much of the mining, movement and initial processing has already occurred.
A US$3B Cyanide Market Shows the Value of Successful Leaching Chemistry
Fortune Business Insights estimates the global sodium cyanide market at US$3.01 billion in 2025, growing to US$4.91 billion by 2034, with mining the dominant end market. That is a useful benchmark for the scale of gold-leaching chemistry, but it measures incumbent reagent spend – not the value of resources or processing problems outside cyanide’s most efficient window.
It does not measure deposits that never become mines because processing is too difficult; refractory gold requiring expensive pretreatment; copper-gold deposits with high cyanide consumption; gold lost through concentrate payability deductions; residual metal left in tailings; projects constrained by permitting or community concerns; or metals that become recoverable as processing improves.
The strategic question is therefore broader than “How large is the cyanide market?” It is: “How much additional metal could become economically recoverable if the industry’s processing envelope expands?”
The Opportunity Is Global – But Not Uniform
Gold mining spans nearly every major mining jurisdiction, including China, Australia, Russia, Canada, the United States, Ghana, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Peru, South Africa and Brazil. The opportunity for alternative processing, however, varies materially by geography.
North America: combines large precious- and base-metal resources, mature mining infrastructure, policy support for domestic processing and significant legacy tailings.
Australia: combines major gold production with deep expertise in refractory and difficult ores, making it a natural market for technologies aimed at complex mineralogy.
Latin America: hosts globally significant gold and copper-gold resources, but permitting, community acceptance, water availability and development complexity can materially affect project economics.
Europe and Cyanide-Sensitive Jurisdictions: vary widely by country and project; there is no universal global prohibition on cyanide mining.
Individual bans, restrictions, permitting hurdles and operating requirements can nevertheless make alternative recovery technologies strategically valuable where projectability matters as much as metallurgy.
Exhibit 3: Cyanide Regulatory Landscape
Source: Company Reports
Regulation Does Not Eliminate Cyanide – It Increases the Value of Safer, More Flexible Processing Options
The gold industry has spent decades developing systems to manage cyanide safely. The International Cyanide Management Code provides a voluntary global framework governing the manufacture, transportation and use of cyanide in gold and silver mining. Participation by major producers, transporters and miners shows both how deeply embedded cyanide is and the operational, environmental and safety discipline required to use it.
Controls can include transportation, storage, containment, detoxification, water management, monitoring, emergency response and closure. The relevant comparison is therefore often total flowsheet cost, not just the purchase price of cyanide.
Critical Minerals Expand the Strategic Value of Better Recovery
Gold is the starting point for this report, but the same processing challenge increasingly extends beyond it. Critical-mineral policy is moving in a similar direction. Canada, the United States and other governments are prioritizing domestic processing, recovery from mine waste, recycling, tailings reprocessing, supply-chain security and lower-impact extraction technologies.
Government of Canada data derived from the IEA shows the combined market value of six key energy-transition minerals increasing from roughly US$325 billion today to US$770 billion by 2040 under the Net Zero scenario, while the rare-earth-element market was estimated at approximately US$7 billion in 2023, US$10 billion in 2030 and US$12 billion in 2040 under the Announced Pledges Scenario. Demand is also rising within an already concentrated supply chain. The IEA projects total rare-earth demand increasing from 91 kt in 2024 to 123 kt by 2030 under its Stated Policies Scenario, while the top three refining countries accounted for 97% of global refining in 2024. Together, these trends are increasing the strategic importance of technologies that can recover critical minerals from complex ores, mine waste, tailings and other secondary resources.
Tailings and complex deposits rarely contain only one metal. A resource mined for gold may also contain copper, silver or critical minerals once ignored because no economic recovery pathway existed. New processing can potentially turn those materials into multi-metal resources; critical minerals should be viewed as co-recovery and secondary-resource optionality, not an extension of the cyanide market.
The co-product model may be particularly important where critical minerals are too dilute to support a stand-alone project. If gold, copper or another primary metal anchors the circuit, critical minerals can become incremental value rather than carrying the full mining and processing cost.
The same logic extends to secondary materials such as end-of-life solar panels, where recyclers increasingly need closed-loop routes to recover silver and other valuable metals.
In 2026, Canada expanded support for critical-mineral projects across extraction and processing, while U.S. policy has increasingly highlighted the recovery of strategic minerals from mine waste and tailings. The direction of policy is increasingly aligned with technologies capable of extracting more value from material that has already been mined.
Requirements for Alternative Recovery Processes
A Winning Alternative Must Solve the Entire Flowsheet, Not Just Dissolve Gold
The search for alternatives to cyanide is not new. Thiosulfate, thiourea, halides, thiocyanate and other lixiviants have been studied for decades, yet broad mine-site adoption has remained limited. Reviews of thiourea identify rapid reagent decomposition and downstream recovery challenges, while thiosulfate literature repeatedly highlights reagent consumption and recovery of dissolved gold as major commercialization hurdles.
The history reinforces a simple point: dissolving gold is only one part of a commercial process. Reagent consumption, kinetics, materials compatibility, downstream recovery, recycle stability, water management and total operating cost all matter.
Four recurring hurdles stand out: reagent stability over recycle cycles; selectivity in the presence of base metals and impurities; reliable downstream recovery without fouling; and a competitive total flowsheet after regeneration, water treatment and residue management.
Reagent stability and consumption over repeated solution-recycle cycles;
Selectivity and degradation in the presence of base metals and other impurities;
Reliable downstream recovery of dissolved gold without fouling from dissolved impurities; and
A total flowsheet that remains competitive after regeneration, water treatment, residue management and other operating requirements.
Any emerging platform therefore has to solve the full process equation, not merely demonstrate that it can dissolve gold.
Commercial Validation and Process Economics
Large Markets Reward Technologies That Prove Repeatable Full-Process Economics
Mining is difficult to disrupt because the processing plant sits directly between the ore body and revenue, so operators prize reliability.
Laboratory performance can change with mineralogy, particle size, impurities, water chemistry, solids loading, temperature and repeated solution recycling. Commercial proof therefore requires more than a headline recovery percentage.
Investors should ultimately look for recovery, reagent consumption, kinetics, impurity management, solution reuse, downstream recovery, water balance, energy use, residue behaviour and full process economics.
Environmental comparisons require the same discipline: replacing cyanide does not eliminate environmental risk, and acidic hydrometallurgical processes can mobilize arsenic, copper, iron and other constituents that require containment, treatment and monitoring.
There is unlikely to be one universal solution. The winners will solve specific, high-value metallurgical problems and demonstrate repeatable performance under real operating conditions.
Industry Investment Drivers
A New Mining Capex Cycle Should Reward Recovery Efficiency
Several forces are converging: high gold prices make incremental ounces more valuable; ores are becoming more complex; mines are looking to stockpiles, lower-grade material and tailings to extend life; copper demand is rising; closure liabilities are receiving more attention; and governments want more domestic processing, especially for critical and strategic minerals.
There is also a strategic incentive for established chemical, reagent, refining and processing companies. A complementary recovery platform could preserve incumbent business where it works while opening new customer feeds, brownfield assets and jurisdictions where current technology is less effective.
Together, these trends are increasing the value of technologies that can recover metals from material conventional flowsheets struggle to process.
The most compelling platforms may therefore change the chemistry without forcing operators to reinvent the downstream plant – preserving familiar recovery steps while opening new processing options.
Sophic Insights: Better Recovery Could Become as Important as New Discovery
The takeaway is straightforward: the next phase of mining investment will require not only more ore, but better recovery from harder ores, concentrates, tailings and legacy materials. Cyanide remains essential to global gold mining, while the more interesting opportunity sits adjacent to its strongest operating window: copper-rich ores, refractory sulfides, concentrates, tailings, legacy materials and cyanide-sensitive projects.
The multi-billion-dollar cyanide market shows how valuable successful gold-leaching chemistry can become, but the larger opportunity may be expanding the universe of economically recoverable metals rather than simply taking share from an incumbent reagent.
These market figures should not be added together into a single addressable-market estimate. They measure different parts of the processing landscape. The question investors should remember is therefore not: What replaces cyanide? It is: What technology can economically recover the metal that today’s flowsheets leave behind?
Coming Up…
In the next Sophic Insights report, we introduce a Canadian processing-technology company developing a non-cyanide hydrometallurgical platform designed to work alongside conventional processing and target higher-value materials existing flowsheets struggle to serve.
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Sophic Capital client RZOLV Technologies Inc. [TSXV: RZL, OTCQB: RZOLF] has contracted Sophic Capital for capital markets advisory and investor relations services.
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