485
koz Au
2P Reserves
(21 Mt grading 0.72 g/t Au)
GOLDEN QUEEN® processing operations utilize heap leach and Merrill-Crowe recovery systems to process gold and silver mineralized material extracted from the Soledad Mountain mine.
Flow Sheet: Heap Leach Pad and Merrill-Crowe Processing
Ore from the open pit mine feeds the primary jaw crusher at a nominal rate of 12,329 tons per day or 4.5 million tons per annum.
Primary crushed ore from the jaw crusher is ground down to -5½ inch and stored at the coarse ore stockpile that feeds two pans and one belt feeder. Once in the secondary cone crusher, the ore is further reduced to -1¼ inch in the secondary cone crusher.
Material from the secondary crusher is stored in a 400-ton fine ore bin which in turn feeds the tertiary high pressure grinding rolls (HPGR) that crushes to a 75% passing at ¼ inch
Feed from the HPGR is agglomerated and conveyed via an overland conveyor to a series of grasshoppers and a stacker that loads the agglomerated ore onto the heap leach pad using30-foot lifts.
From there the ore is irrigated and leached with a nominal 3,000 gpm, dilute cyanide solution. The precious metal-bearing leach solution is then pumped to a Merrill Crowe (MC) gold and silver recovery plant. Precipitated metal from the MC plant is refined, poured into doré bars containing 10:1 gold-to-silver and shipped to a refinery. The barren solution from the MC plant is recycled back to the heap for reuse.
