GoGold Resources says the SART plant has been successfully installed and commissioned at its Parral tailings facility in Chihuahua, Mexico.

The SART (sulphidisation, acidification, recycling and thickening) plant is providing important economic and technical benefits to the Parral facility, according to the TSX-listed company. This includes the recovery of a high-grade saleable copper sulphide product, the re-generation of cyanide, which is the largest single operating cost at Parral, and an improvement in the leaching efficiency of the heap.

The company announced back in June 2019 that it had retained BQE Water to design, construct and commission the plant at Parral. This contract followed on-site testing and preliminary assessment of SART integration into the metallurgical process at Parral that BQE completed earlier in the year.

Brad Langille, President and CEO of GoGold, said: “Our team at Parral has successfully adapted agglomerated heap leaching to old mined waste at Parral, and the SART is a further optimisation of this innovation.

“The operation produces low cost gold and silver ounces while providing environmental remediation for the town of Parral. We see this expertise which we’ve developed over the last six years of operation as a real asset to the company that may be applicable to the millions of tonnes of mined waste in Mexico and beyond.”

The commissioning phase began in late January, and steady production was reached in early March, GoGold said. The plant is currently operating as intended, producing copper sulphide precipitate and re-generating cyanide. Its introduction has reduced the need for purchased cyanide by more than 20%, or around $200,000 ($140,378) in the month of March, according to the company, with the revenue attributed to the copper sulphide precipitate offsetting the costs of operation of the SART plant.