Custom Processing Of Bulk Sample At Gold Mill Active

ROUYN NORANDA, QC - Frank J. Basa, P.Eng., President and CEO of Granada Gold Mine Inc., said, “Custom processing of the bulk sample at a local gold mill is both economically viable and risk-free.  The milling program is designed to ascertain the gold grade of the mineralized material. To further de-risk the processing of the bulk sample, installation of a processing facility on the Granada Gold Mine property may be warranted should custom processing costs be excessive”.  

Local gold mills, both operating and shutdown, are available in Ontario and Quebec within economic haulage distance of up to 300 kilometers. Processing capacity from 800 to 2,000 tonnes per day is available. None of those mills have an up-front gravity circuit to recover the free gold from the mineralized material from the Granada Gold Mine. The free gold potential has been shown to be up to 50 percent of the gold grade of the mineralized material from high-grade Vein One at Granada Gold Mines which was mined at 9-10 grams per tonne gold.

Custom mill modification to design and install a gravity circuit would require 6 to 12 months. Amending the existing custom mill permit would require 6 months. The total time to first processing would potentially be 6 to 12 months. Custom processing would be undertaken as a campaign in fixed lots to ensure no co-mingling of Granada mineralized material with mineralized material from other companies. Annual processing would be 200,000 tonnes per year for 3 years at a rate of 600 tonnes per day.  Total mineralized material processed over the 3-year time period as a bulk sample is 600,000 tonnes (defined as a rolling start). It is estimated that 3 percent of an ore body is the empirically defined quantity required to most accurately represent the grade of that ore body.  The Company is proposing that the processing of 600,000 tonnes may represent 3 percent of the open pit deposit in the 2-kilometer defined mining strike length of the 5.5 kilometer east-west mineralized structure. The original bulk sample processing program was called Rolling Start and was designed to be undertaken over a three-year period. Two milling agreements have been signed in the past 7 years. In one case, the permits were amended by Granada Gold Mine. Neither mill had the required gravity circuit and both milling agreements were eventually terminated.  

The purpose of a bulk sample is to correlate drill core data to mill grade data, to engineer a plant design, and to improve process economics. The current deposit at Granada Gold Mine, a former high-grade producer at 10 grams per tonne, is only 20 percent explored, with 97000 meters of drilling completed on the main deposit up to 2018.  It is open at depth and along strike. An additional program of 30,000 meters of drilling was started to extend the resource to the north near the world-famous Cadillac Break where over 120 million ounces of gold have been mined in the last 90 years (Source MERN Quebec). Both drill contractors had equipment and technical problems before the drill program was stopped at 18,700 meters in 2021. The company intends to restart the drill program when a suitable drilling contractor can be engaged to complete the remainder of the 30,000 meters plus an additional 90,000-meter program. Total meters drilled would be then about 217,000 meters.