Monument Mining Ltd reports that it has completed construction of the Intec Pilot Plant and placed it into commissioning at the Selinsing gold mine site in Malaysia. The pilot plant was built as a part of the Intec Trial Testing Program to exploit Intec’s sulphide dissolution and gold recovery technology using the existing Selinsing Gold Processing Plant under the Interim Intec licence. An exclusive licence of Intec Technology over South East Asia territory will be granted upon success of the Commercial Intec Trial Testing Program. The pilot plant has been constructed in-house using local Malaysian fabrication firms with technical and engineering specifications supplied by DCS Technical Services Pty Ltd of Australia, the main technical consultants for the Intec Process.
The design of the pilot plant circuit is based on the first stage extensive metallurgical and chemical laboratory test work completed by the in-house Monument Research and Development team, which has successfully demonstrated the technical ability of the Intec technology to dissolve sulphides and recover gold from the sulphide material on a bench scale test work program in the Selinsing laboratories.
The pilot plant trial testing work will run for several weeks under different parameters including using different sulphide feed stock materials. The purpose is to demonstrate two main aspects of the process; that the bench scale batch test work results can be duplicated in a continuous flow process and that the process can be successfully scaled-up. The company says it will consolidate all technical results from pilot plant test work in a comprehensive internal technical report by the end of November 2015. In order to satisfy both the independence and technical QA/QC aspects of the results, Orway Mineral Consultants (WA) Pty Ltd of Perth, Western Australia have been engaged to oversee and observe the pilot plant operation and critically review technical and financial OPEX and CAPEX results for Monument by end of December 2015. It is anticipated that the results of the Intec Pilot Plant trial test work will be included in an updated NI43-101 technical report, targeted for release by end of April or early May, 2016.
The parameters identified through the stage II pilot trial testing work will form a base for a further stage III “demonstration plant test work program”, following by a stage IV “full scale commercial plant construction”. The test work results from each stage will be evaluated and “go” or “no go” decision to a next stage will be made at the sole discretion of Monument upon satisfaction of the technical and economic outcomes. The Monument R&D team have been working on the Intec program for more than 12 months, having started before the Intec Agreement was signed, as part of their due diligence on the process. The Intec Process has been the focus of Monument’s effort to provide a technology that has the ability to process sulphide gold material economically at the Selinsing gold mine – and potentially elsewhere. If successful it will extend the life of the project using the existing Selinsing process facility and infrastructure well into the future. Based on the Intec success in sulphide dissolution and gold recovery results, the test work program will then be extended to exploit Intec technology to sulphide copper and other base metals.
