The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2019 – Published Nov. 1, 2019
The 11.5-million-ounce Money Knob gold deposit lies under the rolling hill beyond International Tower Hill's Livengood camp in Interior Alaska.
International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. continued metallurgical work to define and refine the project flowsheet for its Livengood gold project located along a paved highway about 70 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.
A pre-feasibility study (PFS) completed for Livengood in 2017 outlines plans for a 52,600-metric-ton-per-day mill that would produce 6.8 million ounces of gold over a 23-year mine life, or roughly 294,100 oz annually.
This is based on 392 million metric tons of reserves averaging 0.71 grams per metric ton (9 million oz) gold. Overall, the Money Knob deposit at Livengood hosts 525 million metric tons of measured and indicated resource averaging 0.68 g/t (11.5 million oz) gold.
"The 11.5-million-ounce gold resource at the Livengood Gold Project is in a great jurisdiction and is highly leveraged to the price of gold," said International Tower Hill Mines CEO Karl Hanneman.
Since the completion of the PFS, Tower Hill has focused its efforts on studies to optimize the economics of mining this world-class gold project.
This optimization work has primarily focused on metallurgical studies aimed at optimizing gold recoveries and refining the project flowsheet.
The 2018 program included the collection of 4,000 kilograms (8,818 pounds) of metallurgical composites from select areas of Money Knob, the deposit that carries the gold resource at Livengood.
Roughly half of these samples were processed during 2018 to evaluate optimum grind size and to determine whether different recovery parameters should be applied to different areas of the orebody.
The balance of the samples collected are being used to further this metallurgical work during 2019.
This year, a US$3.7 million program also included the continuation of environmental baseline studies needed to support future permitting and development.
Given the size of the gold deposit, coupled with it lying alongside a paved highway in Alaska's gold mining country, Tower Hill is confident that it can attract a strategic partner with a long-term development horizon to Livengood.
Three major shareholders – Paulson and Co. (31.9 percent), Tocqueville Asset Management (16.1 percent and Electrum Group (14.2 percent) – share this view and as of June owned more than 62 percent of Tower Hill shares.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
Reader Comments(0)