PACGOLD LIMITED Pacgold Limited provided an update on initial metallurgical testwork and drilling assay results from the Central Target, on the Company's Alice River Gold Project (`Project'), 300km northwest of Cairns, North Queensland. Drilling by Pacgold over the past 18 months on the Central Target F1a zone has discovered four high-grade gold shoots identified within granted mining leases, with mineralisation defined over 800m strike and over 500m depth, open in all directions. Initial metallurgical `sighter' test work has been completed by ALS Metallurgy (Perth) on two representative primary high-grade gold composite samples from the F1a zone, along with a low-grade gold sample containing high antimony.
The location of the composite samples is shown in Figure 1 (drill plan). The flowsheet for this test work comprised an initial grind to 300µm for gravity separation and regrind to 106µm for cyanidation (typical industry grind sizes), with results for the two high-grade gold composite samples summarised in Table 1 below. These preliminary metallurgical results are highly encouraging with gravity recoveries ranging from 30% to 61.2% and total gold recoveries after cyanidation of the gravity tail ranging from 89.1% to 97.4%.
These results form the basis for continuation of metallurgical test work and flowsheet optimisation throughout current and future drilling activities. A third test was completed on a composite sample from a small zone containing high-grade antimony and low-grade gold. It is interpreted that the high-grade antimony represents a separate mineral phase to the high-grade gold mineralisation, with negligible overlap between the high-grade antimony and the high-grade gold.
The zones containing high antimony are also spatially restricted and therefore will be excluded from any future JORC resource estimation. As expected, the sighter test results for this sample indicate poor gravity and cyanide gold recoveries. The results for this composite sample are presented in Table 5. Continued metallurgical test work will be undertaken later in 2023 to investigate options to further optimise recovery of the high-grade gold.
