Troy hopes to increase mine life at Karouni

PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Gold miner Troy Resources is hoping to increase the mine life of its Karouni project, in Guyana, beyond the current timeframe of 2020.

Troy said this week that the results of recent grade control drilling programmes and a higher gold price supported additional pit expansions in the Smarts 2, 3 and 4 stages, as well as at the Hicks 1 and 2 pits.

While the expansion investigations were at an early stage, Troy believed that if successful, they could extend the current mine life at Karouni well past 2020.

Over the past three months, the Karouni operation has commissioned several specialist consulting groups to assist with mine planning and scheduling, as well as geotechnical revision and metallurgical audits, following a pit wall failure in December last year at the Smarts 3 pit.

Troy noted that the specialist consultation was likely to continue until the site achieved best practices in the mining, safety, environmental and processing areas, with continuous improvement programmes ongoing.

With mining at Smarts 3 re-established, Troy was anticipating higher-grade ore from the operation to be delivered to stockpiles in September, with some 11 000 t, grading 4.5 g/t gold already blasted.

Troy told shareholders that while full remediation of the Smarts 3 pit was expected to take several months to complete, it should not affect ore mining, which was budgeted at around 80 000 t/m.

The miner noted that given the outlook, consideration was being given to a potential throughput upgrade at the Karouni plant, which would favourably impact on the economics of some of the adjacent lower-grade orebodies.

It was expected that the output expansion could be done at a small capital outlay.