There are competing technologies that can recover micron-gold but these technologies do come with major drawbacks such as being complicated, cost prohibited, ineffective (low recovery rates) and/or environmentally toxic
The most sophisticated of the competing technologies can recover most of the micron-gold within an ore body. But these processes only process kilos per day, they are environmentally toxic, they are very complicated and they are costly to use. All this greatly reduces the profitability of using such processes. Also the owners of these technologies are very protective of them and they do not generally license the use of them to outside companies.
There are some processing plant manufacturers that build special processing plants that can recover a fraction of the micron-gold within an ore body. The gravity types of these processing plants will only recover a small fraction of the 60 to 100 micron materials and most of the 60 micron minus materials is left unrecovered
Processing plants that use leaching processes can recover some of the micron-gold but most of this gold is left unrecovered due to the ineffectiveness of a leach; this is because these plants lack necessary pretreatment circuits, which enables the recovery of the micron-gold.
In most cases the gold within an Alabama type micron-gold deposit will never be recovered unless ETA is used and this is because the other technologies on the market cannot be profitably used due to the fore mentioned problems. Simply put ETA can do what no other extraction technology can do and it can do it efficiently, simply, cheaply and with green processes.