Saturn Metals Derives Elite Recoveries at Apollo Hill
COMMODITY CAPERS: Saturn Metals has announced excellent results from metallurgical test work on samples of mineralised material collected from the Apollo Hill deposit within the company’s 100 per cent-owned Apollo Hill gold project in the Western Australian Goldfields.
“The metallurgy of Apollo Hill is a great differentiator as it gives the opportunity for the company to consider shifting the scale of the deposit’s development,” Saturn Metals managing director Ian Bamborough said.
The company explained that the test work is a key part of its ongoing strategy to grow and progress the Apollo Hill Mineral Resource, which was last upgraded over one year ago to 944,000 ounces.
The results highlighted Apollo Hill’s amenability to simple low-cost mineral processing methods, including heap leach, which can in turn drive lower stripping ratios and efficient mining processes.
An Apollo Hill composite sample derived from high quality diamond core, gave an excellent overall recovery of 81 per cent from intermittent bottle roll tests, preceded with gravity separation, using high pressure grinding roll (HPGR) crushing to 8mm P100 (targeted commercial fresh rock crush size).
These results complement, confirm, and potentially improve on column leach test work previously published by the company where recovery was 73 per cent at 8mm crush on an Apollo Hill typical drill core composite.
A strong average recovery of 77 per cent was obtained for Apollo Hill’s major material types, across the deposit’s lower grade range, using conventional stage crushing and High Pressure Grinding Rolls (HPGR) sample subsets.
This augurs well when considering the reported global average grade of heap leach operations is 0.7g/t and on average 65 per cent of gold is recovered.
Saturn believes the results support its view that Apollo Hill has the potential to join this group.
It also indicates gold recovery may be viable from material which would normally be considered marginal and highlights potential for the use of lower cut off grades to improve economics.
“These excellent results from a comprehensive Apollo Hill sample set, provide a decisive weight of evidence for the application of simple cost-effective mineral processing scenarios at lower cut off grades,” Bamborough said.
“We plan to utilise these new results and the results of our more mill-based metallurgy program as reported in October 2021, to examine the potential for economies of scale in our current resource upgrade process and subsequent studies.”
Email: info@saturnmetals.com.au
Web: www.saturnmetals.com.au
Directors: Ian Bamborough, Brett Lambert, Andrew Venn, Rob Tyson, Adrian Goldstone