Aguia Resources (ASX: AGR) continues to hit milestones in its development of its 100%-owned Santa Barbara gold project in Colombia.
The company’s wholly owned subsidiary Minera La Fortuna SAS has received all necessary to operate the underground workings and processing facility located at Santa Barbara.
Fortuna commenced underground mining in early December with processing of the exploration development material commencing thereafter.
Underground development has commenced on the Mariana and Santa Barbara vein systems after substantive rehabilitation works. Previous underground development and mining on the Mariana and Santa Barbara vein systems exposed gold bearing quartz veins with average grades close to one ounce gold per tonne.
Opening up of the old Mariana workings has exposed the Mariana vein system while development of a new crosscut from the Santa Barbara workings, which will access the old Mariana mine workings below the historic mined zones, has commenced.
A total of 25 tonnes of mineralised exploration development material has been mined and delivered to the pilot processing plant. A total of 246 tonnes of waste material from underground development has been extracted from underground development.
Commissioning of the first mine stope will be completed by the end of January 2025.
The mineralised material mined has been crushed and milling of the crushed material has allowed the existing agitators to be loaded. Each agitator holds five tons of ore. Precipitation of the loaded carbon in the existing precipitation tank will be undertaken in the next few days.
The company is currently completing and commissioning a further three (5 tonne) agitator tanks to provide processing of a minimum 30 tpd. A further four agitator tanks, each of five tonne capacity, will be installed in the coming months to boost production to the 50t pd target.
“After a period of recommissioning of the pre- existing 30 tpd pilot plant and overcoming a few minor mechanical issues that invariably occur, the focus at Santa Barbara is now on demonstrating the benefits of high-grade gold projects,” Executive Chairman, Warwick Grigor, said.
“Installation of additional capital items will both improve the reliability of the processing plant and enable capacity expansion over the next few months. The commencement of exploration drilling in the current quarter will also enable us to start to appreciate the true dimensions of this unusually high-grade gold system. Ongoing project development and exploration activities will see delivering a steady stream of updates over the coming weeks.”
