Kaiser Reef has hit a milestone with the pouring of first gold from the Queens Lode with mining rates supporting its plans to ramp up production.

Mining the Queens Lode, which has wide, high-grade zones of mineralisation that are amenable to mechanical stoping methods, is expected to provide a strong increase in gold production rates at a lower cost per tonne. During the week of trial mining the Queens Lode, Kaiser was able to effectively triple production with the current fleet.

Final results such have 1.2m grading 91.6 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 3.7m at 11.3g/t gold have also been received from the company’s long-running extensional exploration program.

The results were returned in front of and below the previously unmined or tested 19 Level, providing short-term mining targets for level development.

Kaiser Reef (ASX:KAU) added that the development of the decline has reached the 19 Level, the first full new level opened up at the A1 gold mine in several years.

Mining has begun and development is being readied for additional mining fronts.

Queens Lode

The company mined 1,197 tonnes of ore from the Queens Lode during the last week of October, exceeding its airleg budget of 550t per week with an additional 400t of airleg ore using its existing fleet.

This bodes well for the company’s plans to increase production when the main body of the Queens Lode is developed.

A trial parcel of about 1,109t of ore from Queens Lode was treated with an estimated 95% recovery and a head grade higher than the resource grade, which is undoubtedly pleasing to the company.

Final optimisation of designs for this next part of development and mining is being produced currently and has benefitted from the input of final drilling results and confirmation of good metallurgical recoveries seen in the trial batch.

Unmined target area drilling

The extended decline into the Queens Lode has also allowed the company to drill high-grade reefs on the northern side of the lode that were previously inaccessible due to the extensive stope voids from historical mining campaigns.

Results from drilling these reefs are 29.2m grading 3.6g/t gold including 4.4m at 9.3g/t gold, 18.9m at 3.7g/t gold, and 8.7m at 4.7g/t gold.

These results demonstrate that the historical high grade reef system continues below the 19 level to the north of the historical shaft and the Queens Lode, representing an unmined opportunity not accessible to the historic miners.

Kaiser added that it is now reaching the limit of the historical mining where ventilation and water issues were difficult to resolve in the past, giving it the opportunity to reach projected reef mineralisation that has not been mined.

This region has the potential to provide supplementary high-grade ore and will be assessed in the near term.

 

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with Aldoro Resources, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.