Feb 1 2017
In a report announced by Spanish Mountain Gold Ltd., the findings from the company’s targeted metallurgical program for the Spanish Mountain Gold Project based in central British Columbia, Canada was revealed.
The Company earlier announced (October 12, 2016 and November 22, 2016) that it had commissioned Met Solve Laboratories to carry out extra metallurgical testwork to assess the simplification of the process flowsheet through the removal of gravity concentration and the prefloat circuit. The resulting flowsheet is a regular grind-float-regrind-concentrate leach flowsheet used all over the industry.
Test results obtained by the Company successfully show that both these unit operations can be removed from the flowsheet used in the 2012 Preliminary Economic Assessment without any unfavorable effect on either concentrate quality or gold recovery. The latest tests realized a gold recovery to the concentrate in open circuit batch tests as much as 86.8% with an organic carbon content of 0.17 to 0.31%, quite lower than the target value of 0.5% for optimal gold recovery.
Cleaner circuit tailings recirculation within the process is anticipated to cause a flotation recovery exceeding 90%. Additionally the reagent needed for carbon control to the concentrate has been greatly decreased from the 122 g/t presumed for the 2012 PEA to 68 g/t.
Prior testwork has shown gold recovery by cyanidation of such concentrates to be 95% to 97% for a total gold recovery of around 89%. The Company is pleased that the process simplifications have been sufficiently supported and will continue with additional evaluation of the deposit on the basis of a simplified flowsheet.
Our investigative studies have now successfully demonstrated that our project can be advanced on the bases of a lower throughput and a simplified flowsheet. They both highlighted the prospects of lower capital and operating costs in our new two-zone project approach. We look forward to incorporating all the identified benefits in a new PEA in the near future.
Larry Yau, CEO