Capricorn Metals pours first gold at Karlawinda Gold Project

Highlights:

• Gold bars weighing 12 kg (386 oz) were poured in the first smelt on site on 30 June 2021.
• Optimisation of the three-stage crushing circuit to deliver the most suitable product size for ball mill feed in laterite ore is continuing. The crushing circuit has run at in excess of 1000 tph (6.1 million tpy at 70% availability) at times during the 6 days of start-up operations to date.
• The 7.5 MW ball mill has operated at an average of 91% availability during start-up as final testing, inspections and alignments are completed.
• The ball mill has achieved a throughput of up to 480 tph (4.25 million tpy) on an ad-hoc basis during the 6 day start-up period. This is encouraging as 4.25 million tpy is the budget throughput for laterite feed used in generating expected long-term throughputs of:
  • 4.5 – 5.0 million tpy in oxide/fresh blend.
  • 4.0 – 4.5 million tpy in fresh rock.
• Run of mine (ROM) ore stocks continue to build with in excess of 450 000 t of ore now on the ROM pad.
• Ramp up and optimisation activities continue across crushing, processing, and plant services areas.

Mark Clark, Capricorn Executive Chairman, comments:

“First gold production at Karlawinda is a great credit to Capricorn’s construction and operations teams, who with our key contractors, have worked tirelessly to deliver this project. We will now focus our efforts on ramping up the project to full operations as efficiently as possible.”

Read the article online at: https://www.globalminingreview.com/handling-processing/05072021/capricorn-metals-pours-first-gold-at-karlawinda-gold-project/