Kinross Gold to Develop Gil-Sourdough Deposit
Photo Courtesy Kinross Gold Corp.
Gil-Sourdough, a satellite gold deposit about 8 miles east of the Kinross Alaska mill.
In preparation for this Fort Knox Alaska strategy, which involves seeking higher-grade ore from projects within a roughly 300-mile radius of Fort Knox, Kinross invested heavily in dewatering the current tailings storage facility and gained permits to begin stacking tailings in the pit that has been providing ore to the mill and heap leach pads at Fort Knox for the past 25 years. This greatly expands the room to store tailings from milling higher-grade ores, a limitation that contributed to previous plans to wind down mill operations this year. Looking for ore to feed the excess mill and tailings capacity, Kinross has decided to mine Gil-Sourdough, which hosts 29.5 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 0.56 grams per metric ton (533,000 ounces) gold. The company, however, does not currently plan to mine the entire resource. Instead, the Gil-Sourdough development plan is expected to start with mining roughly 10 million metric tons of the resource from smaller pits at an average mined grade of 0.60 g/t gold or roughly 193,000 oz of gold. At current mill recovery rates of around 83%, Gil-Sourdough is expected to contribute roughly 160,000 oz of gold to Fort Knox production over a span of about two years. With Gil-Sourdough located on the property and an existing road connecting the deposits to the mill, this ore can quickly be delivered into the Fort Knox Alaska
Kinross Gold Corp. has found another source of higher- grade ore to feed the mill at Fort Knox, this time within the bounds of the company’s own property about 20 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. On April 9, the company announced that it has officially decided to develop Gil-Sourdough, a satellite gold deposit about 8 miles east of the Kinross Alaska mill. Gil-Sourdough is not a new discovery for Kinross, the company has been involved in its exploration for decades and bought full ownership of the project on the eastern edge of the Fort Knox property in 2011. “This is a very exciting announcement for us to make, Fort Knox employees both current and past have worked on this project for a great long time,” Kinross Alaska Eternal Affairs Manager Anna Atchison told Mining News. These satellite deposits, however, did not fit into the mine plan until the recent Kinross Alaska strategy that leverages the underutilized 14-million-metric-ton-per- year mill at the Interior Alaska gold mine. “While the Gil deposit has been part of the company resource portfolio for many years, it is only with the recent paradigm shift to leverage the Fort Knox mill and today’s continued strong gold price environment that the company sees a timely opportunity for development,” Atchison said.
6
May 2021 I The Alaska Miner I www.alaskaminers.org
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease