Lahontan Gold (LG.V) has released the results of a review of the metallurgical data on its flagship Santa Fe mine project after completing dozens of bottle roll tests and column tests. The results of those tests are then discounted to account for scaling up the size of the throughput and Lahontan applied a 3% reduction in recovery rates on the main Santa Fe deposit and a 5% reduction on all other satellite zones.
This results in the table above. The weighted average gold recovery rate is approximately 74.4% while about 29% of the silver will likely be recovered as well using a ½ inch crush size. The company ran some tests to see if a smaller crush size would have a positive impact but it reported there is ‘little benefit’ in doing so. The data can now be used in a preliminary economic assessment on the project which contains 1.65 million ounces gold-equivalent across all categories (1.1Moz AuEq in the indicated resource and 544,000 ounces AuEq in the inferred resource category).
Disclosure: The author has no position in Lahontan Gold. Please read the disclaimer.
