Gold production and exploration company Silver Lake Resources (ASX: SLR) has purchased a milling circuit located in Western Australia for A$3 million.
The milling infrastructure was built in the 1990’s and consists of a 250tph crushing circuit, a grinding circuit with 3 ball mills and a 7 stage CIL circuit with a plant capacity up to 2.5mtpa. The company said the milling infrastructure is in good condition and readily relocatable.
Silver Lake’s strategy has been to source a low capital milling option for the Murchison projects located 600km north of Perth between the towns of Mount Magnet and Cue in Western Australia.
The Murchison projects have a current resource of 13.7 million tonnes at 3.0 g/t Au for 1.32 million ounces.
Les Davis, managing director, said “this acquisition is aligned with our strategy and instantly delivers us the long lead time infrastructure required to bring our Murchison projects into production."
“The milling circuit can be configured to the expected 1.2mtpa base load production profile in the Murchison and given the recent resource upgrade at our Mount Monger Operations, the remaining infrastructure may be located there” Davis added.
Silver Lake has a resource base of 2.5 million oz in highly prospective regions including the Mount Monger goldfield and the Murchison (Tuckabianna, Comet, and Moyagee) in Western Australia.
Silver Lake’s strategy is to develop large production centres at Mount Monger and at the Murchison with multiple mines at each centre.
The company reported a June 2010 JORC Resource inventory totalling 17.8 million tonnes at 4.4 g/t Au for 2.5 million ounces on July 29, an increase of 70% from the June 2009 inventory.
The company has added over 1 million ounces of gold to its resource inventory during the year after mining 66,700 ounces and expects further encouraging results at its Mount Monger and Murchison projects.