The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Metallurgical testing captures 97% of gold with a coarse grind North of 60 Mining News – June 24, 2022
A 400-pound composite sample of 2021 drill core averaging 11.85 g/t gold, 6.2 g/t silver, 0.52% copper, 5.13% zinc, and 1.27% lead was used for the JT deposit metallurgical program.
HighGold Mining Inc. June 22 reported that testing shows that conventional metallurgical techniques yield very high-quality copper, zinc, lead, and gold concentrates from the JT deposit on its Johnson Tract project in Southcentral Alaska.
According to a calculation completed prior to the start of 2020 drilling, the JT deposit hosts 2.14 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 6.07 grams per metric ton (417,000 ounces) gold, 5.8 g/t (397,000 oz) silver, 5.85% (275.3 million pounds) zinc, 0.57% (26.8 million lb) copper, and 0.71% (37.6 million lb) lead.
Using a composite sample of the dominant JT deposit mineralization, Blue Coast Research Ltd. completed the metallurgical work.
HighGold reports that locked cycle flotation tests with a coarse primary grind yielded very high-quality copper, zinc, lead, and gold concentrates with very good metal recoveries. These concentrates have very low impurities and negligible penalty elements.
Highlights include:
• Gold recovery of 97.2% combined total of payable gold to concentrates and leaching of tails.
• Zinc recovery of 92.3% to a concentrate grading 52.6% zinc.
• Copper recovery of 84.5% to a concentrate grading 30.6% copper.
• Lead recovery of 72.4% to a concentrate grading 62.1% lead.
• Gold pyrite concentrate grading 64.3 g/t gold.
"Metallurgy is critically important to understanding the potential economics of a mineral project and these new results, which corroborate and enhance decades-old historic data, are an important step in de-risking the JT Project and laying the foundation for future engineering and economic studies," said HighGold Mining President and CEO Darwin Green. "In addition to producing gold-enriched base metal concentrates that are highly attractive for global smelting market, the program was also successful in producing a saleable high-grade gold concentrate. The ability to produce a separate gold (pyrite) concentrate provides processing optionality with the added environmental benefit of generating tails that contain very low-sulphide content."
Additional metallurgical test work is ongoing to assess JT Deposit variability, including the evaluation of other mineralization styles such as the footwall copper zone. Several opportunities for further optimization and flowsheet refinement exist and will be evaluated in future studies.
An updated and expanded mineral resource for JT that incorporates 27,000 meters of drilling completed in and around the deposit over the previous two seasons is expected soon.
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.
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