Name: Albazino mine.

Location: Khabarovsk region, Russia.

Controlling Company: 100%

Brief Description: Albazino is a high-grade refractory gold mine developed as a greenfield project by Polymetal. It comprises an operating open-pit and underground mine, as well as a 1.7-million-tonne-a-year on-site flotation concentrator that was launched in 2011. Albazino is an integral part of the group’s largest project — the Amursk POX Hub, where Albazino gold concentrate is transported and then processed into doré bars.

Brief History: Polymetal acquired Albazino in 2006 from a local placer miner for $7-million. Active exploration on site started in 2007, and the first Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant ore reserves estimate was confirmed by a feasibility study in the second quarter of 2008.

Construction of the Albazino concentrator started in the third quarter of 2008 and was successfully launched with the first gold concentrate bagged in April 2011. The same year, first concentrate shipments were made to third-party off-takers in China while the Amursk POX facility was under construction.
 

Products: Gold.

Geology/Mineralisation: The Albazino deposit comprises several seemingly isolated north-west-trending mineralisation zones separated by fault-bounded structural blocks. Mineralisation extends more than 7 km in length with the Anfisa, Olga, Ekaterina and Farida zones in the north-east, and Nadezhda in the north-west.

Gold mineralisation at Albazino is of the low-sulphide, gold/pyrite/arsenopyrite type, and is associated with moderately dipping dykes that crosscut sandstones. The most intense gold mineralisation is associated with fold zones, averaging between 10 m and 30 m in thickness with intense veining.

Reserves: Total mineral reserves as at January 1, 2018, were estimated at 15.13-million tonnes of ore, with an average gold grade of 4.7 g/t, containing 2.3-million ounces of gold. 

Resources: Total resources as at January 1, 2018, were estimated at 8.3-million tonnes of ore, with an average gold grade of 4.6 g/t, containing 1.2-million ounces of gold.

Mining Method: Openpit (70%) and underground (30%).

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: Albazino ore is not amenable to recovery by conventional cyanidation. 

Run-of-mine ore is fed to the primary jaw crusher and reduced to 250 mm, which is then subject to three-stage milling in one semiautogenous mill and two ball mills, followed by two-stage conventional flotation in parallel circuits. The flotation concentrate is then thickened, filtered, dried, bagged and shipped to the Amursk pressure oxidation (POX) facility for further processing, while the flotation tails are thickened and sent to the valley-fill tailings storage that is lined with an impoundment dam.

POX is followed by carbon-in-leach processing at Amursk.

The Albazino concentrator has a design capacity of 1.6-million tonnes a year.

Prospects: The current life-of-mine plan provides for open-pit mining until 2031, with further extensions expected as a result of pit enlargement and additional exploration activities, particularly exploration at the Ekaterina and Farida ore zones, as well as regional exploration.

Contact Details:
Polymetal International, tel +7 812 334 3666
Fax +7 812 753 6376
Email pr@polymetal.ru
Website https://www.polymetalinternational.com