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Cerro Vanguardia mine

23rd September 2016

By: Sheila Barradas

Creamer Media Research Coordinator & Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Name: Cerro Vanguardia mine.

Location: The mine is located in Santa Cruz province, southern Patagonia, Argentina.
Controlling Company: AngloGold Ashanti has a 92.5% stake in Cerro Vanguardia, with Fomicruz, a State-owned company operating in the province of Santa Cruz, owning the remaining 7.5%.

Brief Description: Cerro Vanguardia is AngloGold’s only mining operation in Argentina. It comprises several openpits and multiple underground mines located in different parts of the property. Openpit mining is distributed between multiple operating pits, typically three to five at any one time, depending on the plant feed requirements.
Currently, the Fortuna, Osvaldo 8, Osvaldo 9, Verónica and Zorro underground mines are mined simultaneously. The underground workings, which began production in 2010, account for about 20% of total production, a percentage that will increase in the next few years. Low-grade material is stockpiled and processed as heap leaching.
Brief History: Gold exploration at the site started in the late 1980s by Fomicruz and Minera Mincorp – a joint venture between Anglo American Argentina Holdings and local private company Perez Companc. Cerro Vanguardia began as an openpit operation in 1998 and was supplemented in 2010 with the start of shallow underground mining to access high-grade material. The heap-leaching operation started in 2012. The mine has been operated by AngloGold Ashanti since 1998.
Products: Gold and silver as a by-product.
Geology/Mineralisation: Cerro Vanguardia is located in the core of the 60 000 km2 Deseado Massif, one of the most extensive volcanic complexes in southern Patagonia, Argentina. The Deseado Massif is an extensive rhyolite province of Middle to Upper Jurassic-age deposited over Paleozoic low-grade metamorphic basement rocks. These rocks are exposed in erosional windows through overlying Cretaceous sediments and Tertiary to Quaternary basalts. The orebodies comprise a series of epithermal vein deposits (low-sulphidation deposit) containing gold and large quantities of silver, produced as a by-product.

The mineralisation is concentrated in steeply-dipping quartz veins that cut the flat-lying ignimbrites and volcaniclastic rocks. The Cerro Vanguardia district contains about 100 gold- and silver- bearing epithermal veins for a cumulative, exposed vein strike extension of more than 240 km. Fifty-seven veins are currently known to contain economic gold and silver mineralisation.

Reserves: Proven and probable mineral reserves as at December 31, 2015, were estimated at 14.92-millon tonnes, grading 2.55 g/t of gold.

Resources: Exclusive mineral resources as at December 31, 2015, were estimated at 25.50-million, grading 2.71 g/t of gold.

Mining Method: Cerro Vanguardia uses conventional openpit mining with a doubled bench height of 20 m and longhole stoping in the underground mine.

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: Most of the mine’s infrastructure is located in one area. It includes a camp site with room capacity for more than 1 000 people, a 3 000-t-capacity Merrill Crowe plant, two-million-tonnes-a-year heap-leaching facilities, a cyanide recycling plant, a mine laboratory, maintenance facilities, warehouses and a sewage processing plant.
Four natural gas power generators, fed by a 40-km-long pipeline provide electricity to the operation. Natural gas is also used for heating. Dewatering supplies water for processing purposes and camp consumption. Owing to the particular features of the mine, and to improve the efficiency of hauling, all pits have local, single or multiple waste dumps. The tailings dam is located in and contained by a natural depression.

Waste dumps and heap-leach stockpiles are located adjacent to each pit. Plant-grade ore feed is trucked to either the long- or short-range stockpiles to smooth out the head grades and avoid recovery losses, owing to higher-than-planned silver grades.

Prospects: The expansion project to increase underground production at the Cerro Vanguardia over the next five years is under way and remains on schedule. During 2015, an initiative to accelerate openpit and underground operations using an external contractor was approved to enhance the production profile. Additional cost reductions are planned by further increasing plant throughput and recovery, as well as by improving shift configuration and backfilling mined-out pits with waste material to reduce haul distances. Additionally, in February, an exploration and option agreement was signed to acquire the mineral rights adjacent to Cerro Vanguardia, where exploration will be focused in the next few years.

Contact Person: Senior VP investor relations and group communications – global, Stewart Bailey.

Contact Details:
AngloGold Ashanti,
tel + 27 11 637 6000,
email sbailey@anglogoldashanti.com, and
website http://www.anglogoldashanti.com.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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