North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Nova Minerals Ltd. Aug. 8 reported highly encouraging gold recovery results from its first phase of metallurgical test work on mineralization from its high-grade RPM North deposit on the Estelle property in Alaska.

Currently, it is envisioned that ore mined from RPM would be transported to a central processing facility at Korbel, a larger but lower grade gold deposit that lies about 16 miles to the north.

According to an initial scoping study completed earlier this year, a mine at Korbel would produce 1.96 million ounces of gold over an initial 15 years.

The open pit operation outlined in this study would mine 195 million metric tons of ore from the Korbel Main deposit averaging 0.41 grams per metric ton, which would be upgraded to 0.7 g/t gold with an ore sorter before being fed into the mill, floatation, and leaching gold recovery circuit.

The metallurgical work completed for RPM considers the same gold recovery technique.

Floatation tests conducted at Bureau Veritas in Vancouver, British Columbia, recovered 92.4% of the gold from RPM mineralization averaging 1.34 grams per metric ton gold into a concentrate with 14.3% of the flotation feed mass.

Intensive leaching at Bureau Veritas Vancouver recovered 96.2% of gold contained in this floatation concentrate, resulting in an overall gold recovery of 88.9% from RPM mineralization.

"The new metallurgical test work from the RPM Deposit at Estelle continues to demonstrate encouraging gold recoveries on the high-grade deposit using composite samples of only 1.34 g/t," said Nova Minerals CEO Christopher Gerteisen. "These results from RPM are a significant improvement on the positive results already achieved from the Korbel Deposit and harmonized with the existing flowsheet."

The strong gold recoveries and higher-grade gold mineralization at RPM are expected to boost the economics of a second scoping study for an expanded operation on the Estelle property that is slated for completion later this year.

The initial study was based solely on the Korbel Main deposit, which hosts 286 metric tons of indicated resources averaging 0.3 g/t (3 million oz) gold, plus 583 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 0.3 g/t (5.1 million oz) gold.

The gold grades at RPM North are nearly seven times higher.

According to a calculation completed earlier this year, RPM hosts 23.1 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 2 g/t (1.5 million oz) gold.

Nova is currently carrying out drilling to upgrade and expand this resource.

Initial results from the 2022 drilling at RPM can be read at Nova drills 140m of 6.5 g/t gold at RPM in the current edition of North of 60 Mining News.

It is expected that upgraded resources for both RPM and Korbel will be incorporated in a phase-two scoping study later this year and a prefeasibility study slated for 2023.

Author Bio

Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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