Tag Archives: Parral

SART plant up and running at GoGold’s Parral tailings facility

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.

GoGold signs up BQE Water for SART plant at Parral tailings operation

BQE Water says it has been retained by GoGold Resources for the implementation of a sulphidisation, acidification, recycling and thickening (SART) plant at the Parral operation in Chihuahua, Mexico.

The contract comes after on-site testing and preliminary assessment of SART integration into the metallurgical process at Parral that were completed earlier by BQE Water.

Under the contract, BQE Water’s scope of work will include plant engineering design, process automation, engineering support during procurement and construction, plant commissioning, and ongoing operations support after plant start-up. The plant construction is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Once the plant is commissioned, BQE Water will provide operations support services for a monthly fee for a period of three years, it said.

Owned and operated by GoGold Resources, the Parral project involves the reprocessing of old tailings to recover silver and gold by conventional cyanidation. In addition to the precious metals, the tailings also contain significant quantities of cyanide soluble copper and zinc. These base metals compete for cyanide, causing high cyanide consumption and increasing operating costs, according to BQE.

Anis Nehme, COO of GoGold Resources, said: “We have been working with BQE Water for the past few years to evaluate SART integration into the Parral project and we are relying on their expertise to help us maximise the positive contribution SART can bring to the project’s overall performance.”

David Kratochvil, President & CEO of BQE Water, said: “This contract is further proof of our leadership in the safe, cost-effective and rapid deployment of SART to help precious metals producers improve the metallurgical and environmental performance of their projects.

“We stand behind our proven process designs perfected over multiple large projects completed in the past decade and in our operations support capabilities to ensure SART benefits are maximised while operational risks are minimised.”

The SART process recovers copper from cyanide leach solution while allowing free cyanide to be recycled back to the leaching of precious metals. This lowers the cost of gold extraction and reduces the environmental footprint of gold mining projects, BQE says.

“SART can be a game changer that favourably shifts project economics and enables projects to move forward,” BQE said, adding that fewer than 10 industrial scale SART plants have been built and operated globally.