FULL DISCLOSURE: This is sponsored content for Granada Gold Mine Inc..
Granada Gold Mine (TSXV: GGM) has advanced plans for an on site gravity concentration facility at its flagship Granada Gold Project, after an independent environmental consultant completed a site visit to assess candidate locations and prepare the company’s permit application.
The proposed facility would upgrade mineralized material at the mine through a conventional gravity circuit housed in a seasonal dome structure set on a crushed rock and membrane foundation. After extraction and ore sorting, material is reduced in size, classified and run through successive stages that separate gold bearing particles using water and centrifugal force, with no chemical reagents involved in the concentration step.
The process is designed to yield a gold-bearing concentrate for further metallurgical evaluation and recovery, building on earlier test work at SGS Lakefield, alongside a barren stream that feeds a closed-loop water circuit. That circuit, made up of a settling pond inside the dome, an external polishing pond and a flocculation and precipitation stage, is built to recirculate process water with no anticipated discharge.
The idea behind the strategy is rather straight forward, in that upgrading grade at the mine cuts the volume of rock that has to be trucked off the property for final processing.
READ: Granada Gold’s Resource Jumps to 1.76 Million Ounces Across All Categories
The site visit is also part of an effort to advance an Authorization Modification Request under Article 30 of Quebec’s Environment Quality Act, which would add on-site gravity concentration to Granada’s existing Certificate of Authorization. A consultant is preparing the application for the province’s environment ministry, with a preliminary version expected in September and a final version targeted for October, subject to engineering design packages.
The concentration step is meant to work in tandem with ore sorting results announced in April, which showed a 2.7 times gold grade uplift at 88 percent recovery using XRT sorting. Run in sequence, the two steps are intended to strip out much of the barren material before final processing, lowering capital intensity and operating cost per recovered ounce.
The permit is the first formal infrastructure step in Granada’s Rolling Start pathway, which builds on an existing authorization to extract 550 tonnes per day for roughly 590,000 tonnes. The approach is designed to pin down grade through a bulk sample ahead of any full production decision, which would follow a feasibility study.
It also follows a June resource update that lifted measured and indicated resources 64 percent to 890,600 ounces of gold (15,982,000 tonnes at 1.73 g/t Au), with inferred resources up 90 percent to 865,500 ounces (20,096,000 tonnes at 1.34 g/t Au).
“Walking the ground with our environmental consultant takes this from a concept to a location, and from a permit toward a plant,” said Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Basa, who framed the combination of ore sorting, gravity concentration and a larger resource as a lower cost route from a permitted bulk sample to a production decision.
Granada Gold Mine last traded at $0.035 on the TSX Venture.
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