News: Bullabulling Gold's metallurgical results reinforce potential

Bullabulling Gold (ASX:BAB, LON:BGL) has identified more potentially significant cost savings in the gold recovery process at its flagship project in Australia.

The explorer, which is fighting an A7c per share takeover bid from Chinese–owned Norton Gold Fields, said metallurgical tests had further reduced the amount of lime and cyanide required.

These two are major components of Bullabulling project’s operating costs and the latest tests showed up to an 87% reduction in lime usage and a 28% reduction on average in cyanide consumption.

These were sizeable improvements on the initial test results in March, which showed up to a 64% fall in lime usage and a 26% drop in cyanide.

In its pre-feasibility study for the Western Australian deposit, the cost of reagents was estimated to exceed US$30mln a year, or US$170 an ounce of gold mined.

“A reduction in the consumption of these reagents of the magnitude indicated by the test-work results has potential to significantly reduce gold production costs,” Bullabulling said.

More work will be undertaken to see if flotation is viable as a way to increase gold recovery, the company said, in addition to further metallurgical work on the ore.

“The next phase of test-work will focus on establishing gold recovery factors under the optimised process conditions and testing the variability of metallurgical performance in different areas of the deposit.”