Hycroft Mining Exceeds Feasibility Results
RENO, NV - Hycroft Mining Corporation CEO Randy Huffington said, “We have recapitalized our balance sheet and continue to make progress across a wide range of initiatives to create shareholder value. In particular, we are focused on providing viable alternatives for the production of our more than 25 million ounces of gold equivalent sulfide resources1 at our Hycroft mine. Randy Buffington, CEO, comments: "we are excited to have assembled a team that is remarkably talented and capable of realizing the potential of the Hycroft mine. The mill demonstration plant has provided the confirmatory results that we expected and we have started sulfide leach column tests and a test heap leach pad to assess the viability of a companion heap leach scenario for our sulfide and transitional ore.
We have restructured our operating team at the mine site under Warren Woods, our Hycroft General Manager and our technical mining team under Steve Newman, our Director, Feasibility Studies.
We have achieved results that are consistent with past metallurgical test work and that confirm the data used in the November 2014 Feasibility Study for the construction of a mill to process our sulfide and transitional ore. Further, in shorter optimization runs, we have exceeded feasibility results. We plan to operate the demonstration plant for another four to six weeks to evaluate optimization options to reduce capital and operating costs in the mill economics. Specifically, we are seeing results that lead us to believe that we may be able to improve recoveries and reduce retention times in the various process circuits, thus having the potential to reduce equipment requirements (from those metrics used in our November 2014 Feasibility Study).
We are also focused on pursuing options to reduce capital intensity. In October 2015, we began testing the possibility of oxidizing (using trona as the pH modifier) and leaching the transitional and sulfide ore in a heap leach scenario. The preliminary results of column testing demonstrate encouraging recoveries over the initial 150 days, in excess of 50%. Given the positive preliminary results, we have constructed a sulfide test pad that will attempt to replicate the columns' results in an industrial setting. If the sulfide test pad results confirm the column data, both the capital and operating costs to process the sulfide ore could be significantly lower than those costs included in our November 2014 Feasibility Study.
We have retained a leading engineering-construction firm to provide an updated feasibility study for the mill scenario incorporating the data from the mill demonstration plant, which is expected to be completed at the end of the third quarter of 2016. We have also commissioned this same firm to oversee the operation of the test pad and to prepare a pre feasibility study by the fourth quarter of 2016 using the data from the columns and test pad.”