Saturn Metals Achieves Highly Encouraging Metallurgical Results at Apollo Hill
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Saturn Metals Limited (ASX: STN) reported results from metallurgical test work on samples of mineralised material collected from RC drilling at the Apollo Hill deposit within the company’s 100 per cent-owned Apollo Hill gold project in Western Australia.
Saturn Metals provided a comprehensive list of results from the recent work that included:
Exceptional Overall Recovery from Free Milling Gold
Excellent overall gold recovery of 96.8 per cent was obtained at typical commercial grind sizes (75 micron) in intermittent bottle roll tests (IBRT) and bulk leach extractable gold (BLEG) tests of RC samples for Apollo Hill’s major material typesb and across the deposits full grade range.
Major Gravity Gold Component
The average gravity component of the overall recovery was a very high 65.9 per cent demonstrating the potential for efficient physical processing and lower reagent usage.
First Rate Recovery for Lower Grade Samples
Gold recovery is consistently high across the full grade range (recovery of 97 per cent noted for key rock types grading only 0.24g/t). This indicates the capacity for recovery from material which would normally be considered more marginal and importantly raises the potential for the use of lower cut off grades in resource calculations.
Easy Liberation
At a coarse commercial grind size of 250 micron, average gold recovery was still impressive at 91.3 per cent and the gravity component was very strong at 56 per cent.
Lower Capital and Process Route Optionality
Even at a 2mm crush, average gold recovery was an excellent 80.3 per cent, with strong gravity recovery 47.8 per cent showing the potential for other lower capital and simple processing methods such as early recovery of gold through screening with gravity recovery, vat leach and/or heap leach techniques.
Saturn recently completed a four-hole metallurgical diamond drill program to provide additional material for the next phase of test work already underway.
This work is focussing on mill-based grind size and recovery optimisation, and heap/vat leach metallurgical processing alternatives.
Saturn indicated the results already achieved, combined with results of the ongoing metallurgical drill core test work, will provide important cost information for open pit optimisation studies, used as part of a planned early 2022 resource upgrade, alongside the results of Saturn’s 2021 drilling campaigns.
“These excellent results, from a comprehensive, representative, and importantly well-behaved sample set, complement, and back up earlier metallurgical test results and provides a significant weight of evidence for simple cost-effective mineral processing scenarios at Apollo Hill,” Saturn Metals managing director Ian Bamborough said in the company’s ASX announcement.
“The metallurgy of Apollo Hill is a great differentiator.
“It gives the deposit strong mineral processing and capital optionality and arguably an economic head start.
“We plan to utilise these results, and the results of our ongoing diamond drill core metallurgical test program, to examine the potential for economies of scale in our next planned resource upgrade in early 2022.”
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Email: info@saturnmetals.com.au