Power, page-16

One thing to understand with heap leach is that the crush size is not to the same level as needed to liberate gold for traditional processing.

That helps to significantly reduce power requirements for crushing.

Victoria Gold is crushing to 6.5mm pebbles.
Rio2 is planning to crush to 4 inch pebbles.

As a comparison, Gold Road are crushing to target grind size of 125 μm! ( or 0.125mm )

Rio2 will be using 2 generators for power capacity of 2,820 kw for approx 85,000 ounces pa.



(if same ounces as Gruyere below extrapolating would need 9,952 kw, so this heap leach operation has 25% of the power requirements of traditional processing )

Gruyere operation 300,000 ounces pa and using a capacity of 42,236 kW.
Note that 75% of their power is for grinding.