Tectonic starts with metallurgy at Flat
Knowing there is a lot of gold, company eyes recoveries first North of 60 Mining News – September 9, 2022
Last updated 9/8/2022 at 12:47pm
Tectonic Metals Inc. Sept. 7 announced that it is carrying out a baseline metallurgical program aimed at de-risking Flat, an intrusion-hosted, bulk tonnage gold project about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the Donlin Gold project in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Southwest Alaska.
"Metallurgical testing is one of the most critical steps a company can take in successfully transforming an exploration-stage project into a profitable mining opportunity," said Tectonic Metals President and CEO Tony Reda.
Tectonic leased the 92,160-acre Flat property from Doyon Ltd., an Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) regional corporation, last fall.
Located in the Kuskokwim Mineral Belt, Flat covers the likely lode source of two creeks – Flat and Otter – that are estimated to have produced more than 830,000 oz of placer gold since 1908. When you add in other creeks streams draining Chicken Mountain on the property, this total is more than 1.3 million oz of alluvial gold.
Historical exploration carried out from the 1960s until 2003, including roughly 11,000 meters of drilling, has outlined a nearly 4,000-meter-long gold-in-soil anomaly formed by intrusion-hosted mineralization that begins at surface and remains open along strike and at depth.
With ample geological evidence that Flat hosts a substantial gold system, Tectonic has decided to take the rare step of carrying out metallurgical work before the launch of any significant exploration by the company.
"At Flat, we are blessed with historical work, including soil sampling, trenching, and drilling, that suggests the presence of a large mineralizing gold system," said Reda. "With that box ticked and given our business model, it only makes sense that we de-risk Flat as quickly as possible with metallurgical testing to add value quickly and provide a tremendous amount of insight into the processing amenability of the Flat gold mineralization, which in return will shape how we target and explore Flat going forward."
While extensive placer gold production has been recorded from drainages sourced on Chicken Mountain, historical metallurgical testing on intrusion-hosted gold mineralization is limited to a single bottle roll test on drill core material in 1991. While this test indicates that intrusion-hosted gold mineralization at Flat is amenable to direct cyanidation and showed increasing extractions with decreasing particle size for the sample tested, little documentation limits the usefulness of this sample.
To gain a more comprehensive and modern understanding of Flat's metallurgy, Tectonic has collected core from 40 holes drilled in the 1990s that represent four target composites of various intrusive phases, alteration assemblages, and oxidation profiles found at Flat.
The objective of this baseline metallurgical testing is to determine the amenability of intrusion-hosted gold mineralization at Flat to conventional cyanide extraction, flotation recovery, and gravity separation processing options.
"The Tectonic business model is predicated on managing risk from day one onward and kicking off our initial work at Flat with a baseline metallurgy testwork program definitely embodies that philosophy," said Reda.
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