Millennium Minerals has delivered a startling bump in production at its Nullagine gold project, pumping out ~400oz per day over the past fortnight.
The wholly owned mine, which is located in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, is continuing to ramp up, with the site now delivering a rate of 100,000 ounces per annum.
This astonishing headline figure has come well in advance of previous estimates, with Millennium believing Nullagine would hit this production rate during the December quarter.
On the 30th August Millennium broke its daily production record, delivering 540oz of high grade ore.
The strengthening gold production figures have been attributed to higher grade gold delivered from the Bartons underground development and higher-grade open put ore being brought online.
Peter Cash, Millennium CEO said the robust performance at Nullagine was a result of high-quality mineralisation and a strategy to primarily target larger, more sustainable ore sources and then introduce higher grade ore to the plant.
We are absolutely delighted by the quality of the ore being delivered from across the Nullagine Project, with all our mining centres performing very strongly in terms of both tonnes and grade,” Mr Cash said.
“We have put in a huge amount of ground-work over the first half of this year to establish these high-grade ore sources, and to have achieved our annualised production target ahead of schedule is a great credit to the team.
“We are also aggressively pursuing the second component of our growth strategy, which is to increase our mine life beyond five years. Our recent exploration success has increased mine life to more than three years, with plenty of high-quality exploration targets yet to be tested,” he said.
Millennium reports that it is in a strong position to achieve its production guidance for the September quarter.
The company believes it is likely to hit 20-22 thousand oz of production in the September quarter and 25 thousand for the December period.