Polyus Gold Starts Operations at Verninskoye

Polyus Gold International announced at year-end 2011 it had successfully commis-sioned its Verninskoye open-pit mining and processing facility in the Irkutsk region of southeastern Siberia, Russia. After ramp-up during 2012, the current operation is expected to produce 260,000 oz/y of gold based on processing of 2.2 million mt/y of ore grading 2.7 g/mt gold. An expansion to 3.6 million mt/y of plant throughput is cur-rently under consideration.

Capital investment to develop the Verninskoye project totaled $340 million. Construction began in 2009. Development activity included procurement of all neces-sary mining and haulage equipment and construction of roads, warehouses, a shift camp, and a tailings facility. Open-pit devel-opment required excavation of 5.3 million m 3 of rock and 1.36 million mt of ore over the two-year period. Approximately 226,000 mt of the mined ore was processed at other Polyus processing facilities.

During the first half of 2012 the pro-cessing plant will operate using a flowsheet that provides for gravity concentrate genera-tion at the ore grinding circuit, with subse-quent final processing to end product at the existing Polyus processing plant at Zapad-noye. During the second half of 2012, upon installation of flotation and hydrometallurgi-cal equipment, gold production will take place at the Verninskoye plant.

As featured in Womp 2012 Vol 02 - www.womp-int.com