Kinross Hopes to Almost Double Fort Knox Gold Production
Photos Courtesy Kinross Fort Knox
Winter season project work is currently underway by Kinross Gold.
Editor’s Note: This first appeared in The Link, the magazine of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance Kinross Gold sees a way it can increase gold output at its big Fort Knox mine to 400,000 ounces a year, up from previous annual averages of 200,000 to 250,000 oz./year, although this depends on Kinross’ new Peak project near Tetlin meeting expectations and whether development of “Gil Sourdough,” a half-million-ounce deposit near the main Fort Knox mine, can be viable. Kinross is now mining its Gilmore expansion tracts at the edge of the existing pit. This ore will be going to the new Barnes Creek heap leach, the second such chemical ore process facility at the mine. Barnes Creek was Kinross’ first heap leach. Fort Knox, about 20 miles north of Fairbanks in Interior Alaska, is now approaching its 25th anniversary, with the completion of construction and first gold pour in December 1996. The mine taps a large, low-grade ore body that the company has been able to profitably develop using advanced mill technology and highly efficient procedures for mining and moving ore to the mill. Technology innovations Kinross has also been an innovator with it successful development of a heap leach for Fort Knox demonstrated for the first time that this chemical process, which extracts gold from very low grade ore with cyanide, could be done in a far north sub-Arctic environment. There had been experiments with heap
leaches in the Fairbanks area before, but they were at relatively small scale. Fort Knox showed that a heap leach process could be done to scale operated commercially, with its first heap leach going into operation in 2009. Now a second heap leach, the Barnes Creek facility, has been finished and is operating. It will add approximately 1.5 million ounces of gold to the recovery at Fort Knox. Mine is performing well Fort Knox performed well in 2020, Kinross said in its financial reports. with full-year production increased year-over-year compared with 2019, mainly as a result of higher mill grades and mill throughput. Cost of sales per ounce sold for full-year 2020 was largely in line with the previous year. In the fourth quarter of 2020, production and cost of sales per ounce sold were lower quarter-over-quarter mainly due to an anticipated decrease in mill grades and a re- sequencing in mining. Construction at the new Gilmore project was completed on time and under budget, and first production from the new heap leach pad was achieved in January 2021. Peak project Kinross is now bullish about its new Peak project, a higher-grade one-million-ounce deposit on the Tetlin reserve near Tok, east of Fairbanks. The project will truck ore from the Peak mine to Fort Knox and use available capacity in the existing mill, which will keep it in use until at least 2028. Without Peak’s higher-grade
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Spring 2021 I The Alaska Miner I www.alaskaminers.org
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