Benguet gets incentives for gold project
By BERNIE CAHILES-MAGKILAT
April 11, 2010, 11:01am
mb.com.ph
Balatok Gold Resources Corp. (BGRC), a spin-off unit of publicly-listed Benguet Corp., was granted pioneer tax and fiscal incentives by the Board of Investments (BoI) as new producer of dore bullion gold and silver by utilizing the gold mine tailings dumped at its pre-war mining site in Itogon, Benguet.
With a project cost of P630 million, BGRC said it can recover 19,083 ounces of gold annually and 47,708 ounces of silver based on an estimated yield of less than 1 gram per ton of mine tailings. The project will start in January 2011 employing 163 people.
With the high prices of gold, a recovery of even less than 1 gram of gold per ton of tailings is already very attractive. Gold is now selling at $1,135 per ounce. The pre-war price of gold was fixed at only $35 per ounce. Gold pricing was only freed up after the war.
In approving the project on a pioneer status, the BoI cited the company’s milling, dredging process and the new method of extraction from tailings on a large scale basis.
Recovering gold from mine tailings is not a new activity in the country, but this is the first time that this is done on a large-scale basis using the mine tailings during the pre-war mining operations in Benguet.
Existing gold recovery from mine tailings is being undertaken by small and subsistent miners.
To extract the mine tailings, BGRC will also dredge the tailings pond using hydraulic suction to bring the tailings to the mill.
The BoI also said that the milling process to be used for gold recovery may not be new but the process of extraction is different because it is optimizing the use of natural resources, which were otherwise waste already.
The firm will also use carbon in pulp and carbon in leach process after regrinding the tailings in order to free up the gold minerals. The old process uses cyanide and amalgamation.
The BoI said that once the BGRC project is successful, this would open up processing of the vast of gold mine tailings during the pre-war gold mining operations in the country. |
