Alba Mineral Resources plc has completed six successful blasts, advancing 8.1 metres, at the Llechfraith priority gold target, on level five at Clogau-St David’s gold mine in Wales.
THROUGHPUT
Executive chairman George Frangeskides said that the company was on course to complete around 20m of development by Easter.
The current phase of operations has resulted in an overall estimated 90 tonnes of blast material produced to date for sorting and processing.
Operations have now paused to improve roof support, before resumption of mucking out of the most recent blast expected in 24 to 48 hours.
“Processing to date has involved taking samples from each of blasts 1-5 and processing them (a total of 5 tonnes) via crusher/impact crusher and centrifugal concentrator, to produce 83 kg of wet concentrate,” added Alba.
“This has been passed over the Wilfley table to yield 13 kg of wet, clean concentrate.
“This has been further cleaned to remove magnetite content, yielding 4 kg of wet final concentrate, and then dried to yield 3.360 kg of dry final concentrate.”
The company said it needed to assess a volume of the processed and assayed, or refined, total bulk sample sample before commenting on the gold content and grade.
Alba also continues to work on improving the throughput rates in the pilot processing plant, including by increasing water supply to the plant.
“We are very pleased with the roll-out of the drilling and blasting programme to date,” added Mr Frangeskides.
“This represents the most significant development to take place at the Clogau-St David’s gold mine in decades.
“Given the limited capacity of the onsite pilot plant, which is largely constrained by the available space at the mine site, as expected processing rates have not been able to keep up with the significant volumes of material being extracted from underground.
“However, we continue to work on solutions to increase throughput rates at the plant.”
