PERTH (miningweekly.com) - Gold miner Silver Lake Resources would start production at the Wombola pit of its Mount Monger operations, in Western Australia, by March this year.

The miner was looking to increase production at Mount Monger to around 200 000 oz/y by 2014, by mining multiple underground and openpit sources.

Production was currently being sourced from four independent underground mines accessed from the same infrastructure, while openpit production was also being sourced from the Wombola Dam starter pit.

The Wombola pit is located some 9 km from the Daisy Milano mine, and has a Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource of 460 200 t, at 2.9 g/t gold for 42 300 oz of gold. The pit would recover some 19 000 oz over a ten-month period.

Silver Lake said on Wednesday that starting the project in March this year would allow for additional stock ore to be made available for feed in readiness of the Stage 2 upgrade of the Lakewood mill to one-million tons a year, in the September quarter of this year.

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