News

July 11, 2008

No Son, That’s Not The Circus Coming To Town, It's The Freegold Gravity Processing Plant Looking For Gold Dumps

By Charles Wyatt

Last September, Canadian-listed Freegold Ventures announced the commissioning of a 1,200 tonnes per day gravity processing plant up at its Gold Summit project in Alaska. The commissioning loudly signalled the company’s progress up the ladder from explorer to modest producer. The plant consists of a mobile crushing plant and a three-stage gravity circuit that uses variable sized Knelson concentrators and is capable of producing a directly saleable gold concentrate. Its modular nature permits easy modification of both the flow sheet and plant configuration to allow it to keep up with the changing ore characteristics at Golden Summit. And note the word “mobile” – we’ll come back to that later. The company has also established a portable metallurgical lab on site which will enable production feed grades and recoveries to be monitored.

Freegold is therefore able to bulk sample mined ore and dump material with considerable accuracy while generating a modest cash flow. Historical, non 43-101 compliant sampling suggests that the grade of the dump material up at Gold Summit ranges between 5.1 to 8.6 grammes per tonne, and if this proves to be the case the rest of the 35,000 tonnes of material from various locations around the project will be processed. During the plant commissioning phase, the company continued to collect new...