Classic Minerals has officially begun wet commissioning of the processing plant at its Kat Gap gold project in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region, with first ore expected to be produced this month.
Management says it will use part of its bulk sample ore to complete the commissioning phase before processing the balance through its gravity circuit.
Classic’s plant is gravity-based and the company expects it to achieve 73 per cent recovery of gold from ore in the early days of the project. It says more than 95 per cent of the liberated gold will be freed through a simple process at a crush size of less than 2mm, handling 100 tonnes of ore per hour at maximum capacity.
The stage-one plant consists of a standalone crushing facility, fed into a 1.5-micron trommel for screening, then recirculating through a ball-milling operation to achieve optimum screening size. The company says its stage-one facility has a throughput of up to 100,000 tonnes each year.
Classic says its gravity extraction and separation process will utilise hydro-cyclone “Gekko” equipment to produce concentrate ready for gold recovery.
During wet commissioning, the company will take the opportunity to log recovery data that will be used to further progress its design work for the second-stage expansion of the process plant. During the second phase, management will look to introduce a carbon-in-leach (CIL) circuit and upscale the milling to achieve a throughput of up to 200,000 tonnes per annum.
Kat Gap boasts more than 1 million tonnes of ore at 2.19 grams per tonne gold for a total of 80,367 ounces, including more than 20,000 ounces in the indicated category. It sits just 120km south of historic WA gold mining stopover Southern Cross and 50km south of Classic’s 80 per cent-owned Forrestania gold project.
In December last year, the company revealed it had secured funding of $20.1 million for the construction of its Kat Gap gold mine. The deal included a $15 million share put option facility and a $5.1 million convertible note issue through United States-based, LDA Capital. The funding followed final mine approval from the WA Government the previous month.
Kat Gap is a shallow, previously unmined gold deposit that was first uncovered in the 1990s when the now-defunct Sons of Gwalia completed a resource estimate and scoping study at the site.
In January this year, Classic released RC drilling assays from Kat Gap that reported high-grade gold intercepts beneath existing shallower gold mineralisation. Highlight results included 10m at 9.26g/t gold from 57m, including 3m going 28.30g/t and 6m grading a more-than-decent 12.12g/t from 70m. The results extend below known resources at depth, suggesting Kat Gap has plenty of potential to grow.
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By Michael Philipps
