Making a Viable Project Out of Complicated Metallurgy

Do you have a metallurgically complex mineral resource? Core Resources is a specialist metallurgical flowsheet development group with the experience and genuine process engineering capability needed to develop real-world solutions for difficult resources. We’d love to hear about yours!

Your resource could be a primary ore resource, a process bleed stream, or a tailings or effluent stream. Core also has extensive experience in the new generation of speciality and strategic minerals including processing and purification of lithium, graphite, rare earth elements, scandium, cobalt and antimony. Core has a long track record in developing real-world processing solutions that have helped to enable these kinds of mineral projects.

Here’s some of Core’s track record where our process work on complex resources has enabled projects to move forward:

Refractory Gold: GPM Gold owns the Zod gold mine and Ararat Processing facility in Armenia, where an oxide resource had been mined for over 20 years. With the oxide ore depleting, gold recovery from the underlying 14.5 Mt sulphide resource was running at less than 20%. Following a PFS and DFS, flowsheet development and piloting all carried out by Core, GPM Gold has modernised its processing operations with the US$ 140 million construction of an Albion Process treatment plant (shown above) and associated plant/mine upgrades and is now achieving >95% gold recovery.

Rare Earth Elements: Hastings Technology Metals is an ASX listed explorer developing the Yangibana Rare Earths project in Western Australia, one of the largest and most accessible Rare Earths deposits in Australia.  Hastings is targeting production of Neodymium, Praseodymium, Dysprosium and Europium. Core carried out expert flowsheet design, testwork design and management, along with flotation and hydrometallurgical testwork services to support the project’s PFS.  After announcement of the PFS results, Hastings was able to raise $ 9.6m in a placement at a substantial premium to its prior trading price to fund progressing the project into production.

High Arsenic Orebody: Sagittarius Mines is developing the Tampakan project in The Philippines, one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper resources with 2.94 billion tonnes at a grade of 0.51% copper and 0.19 grams per tonne gold – a massive, but complex, resource. Working with previous project owners Xstrata, Core developed the new Toowong Process – a hydrometallurgical process to reduce the arsenic content of Tampakan copper concentrates to a level of <0.1% As, which would rank the Tampakan concentrates as some of the cleanest and most valuable in the world.

Gold/Antimony Tailings: Stibium Mining and its investment partners acquired the historic Cons Murch gold-antimony mine in South Africa with the support and assistance of Core.  Core is now assisting Stibium with on-site support in the recovery and retreatment of gold tailings, and with expansion strategies to ramp up gold and antimony production.  Stibium’s vision is to develop a globally significant Antimony company within the next 5 years and to become the largest Antimony production company outside of China. Core is providing the technical and operational support needed to enable this.

Refractory Gold Tailings: Panterra Gold has a 5 Mt refractory gold tailings resource at its Las Lagunas project in the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Inefficient past processing had left a resource grading nearly 4 g/t gold. Following testwork and pilot plant work at Core, Panterra has constructed an Albion Process plant and is now producing gold at an annualised rate of over 40,000 oz./yr. at a C1 cash cost of less than US$ 700 / oz. Panterra is also looking at supplementary feed sources to further extend the life of the processing facility, visitintegraladjusters.com.

Core’s professionals have decades of experience in mineral processing operations and in developing real world mineral processing solutions based on intelligent testwork and engineering design.

If you have a complex mineral resource, contact us today to see how Core can assist with getting your project moving.