Georgian Mining Corporation (LON:GEO) has today announced positive results from metallurgical test work completed on both copper sulphide and gold oxide core samples taken from the Kvemo Bolnisi East Project (“KB”) on the Tethyan Belt in Georgia. The testwork, which was undertaken by Wardell Armstrong International Ltd, included scoping level metallurgical testing and returned highly favourable results indicating that the copper sulphide mineralisation is amenable to flotation recovery of copper and gold and the gold oxide mineralisation is amenable to heap leach extraction of gold.
The Company believes KB hosts large scale epithermal gold-copper mineralisation and a three-phase strategy is underway to deliver more than 50Mt of copper-gold resources at KB. To date 3.154Mt @ 0.82% Cu & 0.14g/t Au and a gold oxide resource of 2.29Mt @ 0.85g/t Au have been delineated in accordance with the guidelines of the JORC Code (2012), which meets the Company’s Phase 2 target of 3-5Mt.
Copper-Gold Sulphide Ore – Flotation Testing
· Testwork indicates copper and gold found in KB mineralisation is recoverable using standard froth flotation metallurgical processing techniques
· Highly favourable peak recoveries of >90% for copper and 98.4% for gold achieved
· Scoping level metallurgical testing was successfully completed on four composite samples made up of 18 core samples totaling 85.7kg
· Samples were derived from 18 separate diamond drill holes representing a cross section of the ore types found at KB and across Gold Zones 1 and 2 and the Copper Zone
Gold Oxide Ore
· Results of Bottle Roll and Column Leach testwork, which was carried out on 68 half-core samples with a combined weight of 207.3kg, indicate gold oxide resources at KB are amenable to heap leach gold extraction
· As part of Bottle Roll testwork, eight composites were crushed to -20mm and -12.5mm crush sizes and analysed by cyanidation bottle roll tests to determine gold recovery
o The average gold recovery for the -20mm crush size composites was 73.7% Au and the average for the -12.5mm composites was 79.3% Au
o All bottle roll testwork indicates that the gold oxide Resource defined at KB is suitable for heap leach gold extraction
· As part of Column Leach testwork, 60kg of the original test composite was used for the test programme which involved agglomeration and percolation testing and column leach testing at two crush sizes
o Results confirm mineralisation is amenable to heap leaching
o The column leach gold recoveries using the leach liquor and residues assays were 87.5% and 88.4% for the -20mm crush size and the -12.5mm crush size respectively
Georgian Mining Corp Managing Director Greg Kuenzel said, “The gold and copper recoveries from our scoping level metallurgical testwork undertaken by Wardell Armstrong confirm that the copper-gold sulphide ore and gold oxide ores at KB are amenable to processing via flotation and heap leach respectively. We are now integrating the final 28 drill holes from Gold Zone 2 into the Feasibility Study to complete the resource optimisation. This will be followed by the development of new mining models and new pit optimisations based on the updated Resource utilising more refined metallurgical and project planning information in preparation for production. Gold Zone 2 is just one of three zones we have identified at KB which we believe may coalesce at depth to form a large epithermal copper-gold system and which provide the basis for our Phase 3 exploration target of a 50Mt+ copper-gold deposit. We look forward to reporting further results as they become available.”
