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Oil, Gas & Mining vocabulary · Ore Processing

Recovery

Meaning in oil, gas & mining, with examples

/rɪˈkʌvəri/nounCommon term

In oil, gas & mining, recovery means: The percentage of the valuable metal in the ore that a processing plant actually manages to capture in its final product.

In Turkish: verim, kazanım, metal kazanımı

How it is used

A key performance figure for metallurgists: a gold recovery of 92 percent means 8 percent is lost, mostly to tailings. Recovery and concentrate grade are reported together, and improving one often lowers the other. In oil and gas, 'recovery factor' is the share of the oil in place that can be produced.

Example sentences

  1. Copper recovery was 88 percent this month, slightly below plan.

  2. We tested a new reagent to improve the recovery of fine particles.

Common collocations

  • metal recovery
  • gold recovery
  • recovery rate
  • plant recovery
  • recovery factor
  • gradeThe amount of valuable metal or mineral in a rock, usually given as a percentage (for copper) or in grams per tonne (for gold and silver).
  • concentrateThe main product of a processing plant: a powder in which the valuable mineral is much richer than in the original ore, ready to be sold or sent to a smelter.
  • flotationA process that separates valuable minerals from waste: chemicals make the mineral particles stick to air bubbles, which rise to form a froth that is skimmed off.
  • tailingsThe finely ground rock and water left over after the valuable minerals have been removed from ore in a processing plant.
  • leachingDissolving a metal out of ore with a chemical solution, for example cyanide for gold or sulphuric acid for copper, and then recovering the metal from the solution.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Ore Processing

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