Meeka Metals has confirmed gold recoveries up to 99.4 per cent from metallurgical test work on ore from the company’s St Anne’s deposit that forms part of its greater Murchison gold project.
The program assessed conventional carbon-in-leach gold recovery for St Anne’s mineralisation at 150 micrometre grind size with results ranging from 97 per cent to 99.4 per cent for an average of 97.9 per cent.
Meeka says it recorded low cyanide consumption and low leach residue tail grades in all tests whilst rapid leach kinetics achieved average recoveries of 91.1 per cent after four hours and 94.7 per cent after eight hours. The average gravity gold recovery came in at 48.5 per cent from a range between 28.9 and 82.1 per cent.
Just last month the explorer intersected a new zone of shallow high-grade oxide gold at the St Anne’s deposit, prompting the company to defer its planned release of the prospect’s mineral resource until the March quarter next year.
Meeka Metals Managing Director, Tim Davidson said: “High gold recoveries, rapid leach kinetics and low cyanide consumption, coupled with the shallow, high-grade oxide nature of the mineralisation, points to St Anne’s making a meaningful contribution to the pre-feasibility study due in mid-2023.”
The company’s Murchison gold project already lays claim to a 1.1 million ounce resource and is strategically positioned next to a 1.8 million tonne per annum gold mill and a key highway.
Meeka has seen some excellent figures from the laboratory this month with positive results from test work at its Cascade Valley rare earths project near Esperance with up to 90.4 per cent of the elements recovered in the less than 20 micrometre fraction.
The company says cheap and simple screening and hydro-cyclone classification can be applied to discard the coarse fraction greater than 20 micrometres and remove up to 65.5 per cent of the mass whilst retaining up to 90.4 per cent of the rare earth elements.
The test work also shows that rare earth grades increase by up to 91 per cent by rejecting the coarser fraction across the light, heavy and magnet rare earth elements categories.
Meeka says the positive results confirm that broadly adopted large scale mineral processing techniques can be applied to remove waste from the process stream prior to leaching. The next phase of metallurgical testing is now underway and will include recovery optimisation test work in addition to leach tests.
The explorer is expected to announce an updated mineral resource for its Turnberry deposit before the end of year that will include results from 16,213m of drilling completed since June last year. Extensional air-core and RC drilling is currently underway at both Turnberry and St Anne’s.
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