Ora Banda on track to boost Davyhurst gold production

Ora Banda continues to ramp up gold production at its Davyhurst project in WA towards its DFS level of about 82,000oz in the 2022 financial year.

On the mining front, the company is on schedule to start open pit mining at the Missouri deposit in June while Riverina open pit mining operations continue to perform ahead of plan into increasingly harder transitional and primary material.

Missouri is a source of higher grade, harder primary ore feed that is expected to improve mill throughput and gold production.

Production rates at Ora Banda Mining’s (ASX:OBM) Golden Eagle underground mining operations have also increased during May following the successful introduction of specialised mining equipment, providing increased quantities of primary ore.

The company adds that the Davyhurst process plant continues to be negatively impacted by the high proportion of viscous, low density oxide material within the initial Riverina ore blend.

However, the increasingly harder transitional and primary material from Riverina, increasing quantities of primary ore from Golden Eagle, and the start of primary ore deliveries from Missouri in late June will result in a more uniform ore blend being available for processing at the plant from July.

This ore blend is expected to increase gold production to DFS levels during the September quarter.

“Whilst there are always challenges when commissioning a mining project, we are encouraged by the refinements we are making to improve gold production towards the DFS estimates,” managing director David Quinlivan said.

“The advancement of Missouri in the production schedule will go a long way to conquering ore viscosity issues encountered during commissioning.

“We are also seeing improvements in a number of other areas of the project, in particular at Riverina and Golden Eagle, which we believe will bode well as we accelerate our ramp-up.”

Outlook and other activities

The company expects contained gold within ore mined to date plus ore scheduled to be mined to 30 June 2020 to be in line with the DFS estimate of 35,000oz.

Gold production for FY2021 is expected to be between 13,000 to 18,000 ounces of gold though its FY2022 outlook remains unchanged from the DFS estimate of 82,000oz recovered.

Ora Banda has also identified an opportunity to address the long assay turnaround times in Western Australia by installing an accredited onsite sample preparation laboratory at commercially attractive terms.

Initial studies to investigate this opportunity have started.

This article was developed in collaboration with Ora Banda, 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.