‘Revelation’: High-grade gold potential discovered in stockpiles at Beaconsfield Mine

Eureka! The new owners of Tasmania’s historic Beaconsfield gold mine say they have uncovered high-grade gold potential.

• Beaconsfield Gold Mine formally acquired by NQ Minerals
• Mining exploration encouraged as Beaconsfield gold mine revived

THE new owner of the Beaconsfield Gold Mine has found “high-grade gold potential” in surface stockpiles at the site in Northern Tasmania.

NQ Minerals on Tuesday announced an average of 3.2g of gold per tonne of material has been found in extensive historic surface stockpiles on the company’s wholly owned site.

Executive Director Roger Jackson said work was progressing at the mine with a refurbishment of its 350,000 tonne per year capacity processing plant well underway.

“Our geological team is examining the multiple surface tailings stockpiles within the Beaconsfield mining lease to identify ore to be processed in the plant when it’s up and running around the end of this year,” he said.

“We are really excited about the discovery of excellent gold grades in roughly 80,000 tonnes of surveyed stockpiles in the historic Wetlands area east of [Beaconsfield].

To date, 105 samples taken from the stockpiles.

MERCURY TASMANIA, WEATHER, READER PIC. Headframe at Beaconsfield gold mine BY Christopher Plunkett

Mr Jackson said all the stockpiles would be sampled in the coming months to determine the full extent of the contained gold in the area.

He said initial metallurgical gold recovery test work indicated standard carbon-in-leach (CIL) gold extraction recoveries of between 83 per cent and 90 per cent can be achieved with relatively short processing times of less than 12 hours in the existing plant.

“The material in the stockpiles does not require crushing or grinding due to its very fine composition and can be fed directly into the processing plant.”

NQ Mineral’s chairman David Lenigas said the “revelation” that significant gold exists in these stockpiles is a tremendous boost for the company’s mine reopening plans.

Tassie Town, Beaconsfield Gold Mine

“Our engineers are now working on budgets and timelines to bring the Plant’s CIL circuit back online as soon as possible to treat this material,” he said.

“These high-grade surface stockpiles are only a short trucking distance from the plant and will provide valuable low-cost high revenue plant feed much sooner than we originally envisaged.

“The removal of these stockpiles from the Wetlands area will also be the start of a process of rectifying a long standing environmental issue in the town by cleaning up old mine waste placed in this area over the last 120 odd years and returning the area back to its natural pre-mining state.”

NQ Minerals expects to employ 250 people at Beaconsfield once the mine is operational again.