Classic Minerals to trial gold mine en route to production

Classic Minerals will begin trial mining at its Kat Gap project in Western Australia’s Goldfields region as it looks to calculate an ore reserve prior to moving into full-scale gold mining and production.

The company says the pit will take about two months to complete, cost about $1.5 million and will target fully-oxidised high-grade ore, representing about half the indicated resource, to a depth of about 45m.

Classic says the oxidised ore will be run through its “Gekko” gravity-fed plant and the metallurgical results will then be compared to the numbers in its current indicated resource. Based on the tonnes, grade and recoverable ounces of gold from the pit, the company will then calculate an ore reserve and if economically viable, move Kat Gap into full-scale mining and production.  

Classic Minerals chief executive officer Dean Goodwin said: “I’m so excited about getting those earthmoving machines back to work on the trial pit because in the next month or so we’ll finally get a good hard look at the high-grade portion of the main ore zone within the new indicated resource. It’s going to be one of those special moments. They don’t come along very often in one’s career so I can’t wait. It’s a proud moment for me and the rest of the team to see all that hard work that has gone into the drilling and resource work over these last few years come to fruition."

Data from the pit will also aid management in its calibration of mining and metallurgy parameters and allow engineers to measure structural data first-hand from the pit’s walls and floor. The additional data will allow Classic to select the best geotechnical parameters to minimise strip ratios and realise dilution and ore loss parameters.

Just last week, Classic’s “Gekko” plant produced the company’s inaugural gold bar during testing, using a 989-tonne section of ore taken from a 6504-tonne stockpile. 

Performance of the plant was found to be consistent with the results of earlier bench-scale metallurgical tests that reported 5 per cent mass recovery and gravity gold recoveries of between 65 per cent and 75 per cent.

The “Gekko” gravity circuit is a precursor to the company’s planned integration of the carbon-in-leach (CIL) process, which is currently under construction and installation. Once completed, the CIL process is projected to further enhance gold recovery rates to an impressive 98 per cent.

Classic recently announced an update to its gold resource at Kat Gap after incorporating two years’ worth of additional drilling data. It says the deposit has indicated resources of 254,900 tonnes at 2.5 grams per tonne  gold giving 20,488 ounces. The inferred resource is 886,512 tonnes at 2.11g/t gold giving 60,139 ounces.

Kat Gap sits in classic WA gold country, just 120km south of historic WA gold mining stopover Southern Cross and 50km south of Classic’s 80 per cent-owned Forrestania gold project that boasts an indicated resource of 7.27 million tonnes at 1.33g/t gold for 311,050 ounces.

The operation is a shallow, previously unmined gold deposit that was first uncovered in the 1990s when the now-defunct Sons of Gwalia (SOG) completed a resource estimate and scoping study at the site. In 2003, SOG estimated Kat Gap resources at 56,000 ounces grading 1.4g/t gold at zero grade cut-off and 36,000 ounces grading 3.9g/t at 1.5g/t cut-off.

But for now, Classic has made its intentions clear at Kat Gap – generate an ore reserve and get on with mining and producing gold. And the market will no doubt be watching this space over the coming months as results of the trial pit come to light.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au