Northern Star expands Pogo plant
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Gold miner Northern Star Resources has approved a $30-million investment to expand the processing plant capacity at its Pogo mine, in Alaska, from 1-million tonne a year to 1.3-million tonnes a year.
The miner said on Monday that work on the expansion project would start this financial year, and would be completed by early in the 2021 calendar year.
Executive chairperson Bill Beament said that the decision to increase Pogo’s production rate reflected the significant confidence that the company had in the asset.
“The extensive changes we have implemented and our ongoing optimisation programme, including the introduction of long-hole stoping and the use of bigger, more efficient mobile mining equipment, have been highly successful.
“We now know that Pogo in the future can comfortably sustain a mining rate of 1.3-million tonnes a year. The progress we are making and the visibility we now have, shows that this is the optimal run-rate for Pogo in terms of sustainability and cost-effectiveness.”
Beament said on Monday that Northern Star’s confidence in the outlook for Pogo was also underpinned by strong exploration results being generated from the newly discovered Goodpaster prospect, some 1 km from the existing mining area.
The Goodpaster prospect is considered the continuation of the main Pogo mineralisation trend across a major north-east trending fault system, broadly coincident with the Goodpaster River valley.
Surface drilling at Goodpaster is continuing with four diamond drill rigs in operation.
“We have owned Pogo for only a year and our exploration results already provide strong evidence that this is an emerging camp-scale system with huge potential to grow the inventory and mine life beyond the current 10-million-ounce endowment,“ Beament said.
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