Overview
Norton owns and operates the Paddington Gold Mine which produced 140,000 oz pa of gold from open cut and underground operations FY2010. Mine life is more than 10 years.
The acquisition of Bellamel Mining Limited in October 2008 added significant gold resources and early access to higher grade oxide ore.
Reserves and Resources
The Paddington geological database acquired by Norton included data from ~60,000 drill holes and appraisal work undertaken over more than 25 years. The project area of 1,100 square kilometres included 69 previously drilled deposits and more than 100 known ore bodies within a 30-kilometre radius of the Paddington mill.
Norton's review of the geological database and subsequent drilling and assessment identified 5.5 M oz of Mineral Resources including 1.20 M oz of Ore Reserves as at 30 June 2010 as defined under the JORC code. Paddington's remaining mine-life is now well in excess of ten years. The Life of Mine Plan as at July 2009 is available by clicking on the following link>Life
of Mine Plan
In late 2008, Norton added the Kalgoorlie West tenements to its portfolio as part of the acquisition of Bellamel.
Since then, Paddington has completed a re-assessment and data validation program to re-calculate Bellamel Resource estimates based on Paddington resource modelling, and incorporating strong geological domaining as well as drawing on more than 20 years’ experience in developing and operating mines in the local area.
The Navajo Chief project in the Kalgoorlie West area will be our first development from the Bellamel tenements. We have advanced it to Reserve status and it will be developed in January 2010 to provide an additional feed source for the Paddington mill as part of our ramp up schedule.
Recent work has involved drilling of the Mount Pleasant and Kalgoorlie West areas, updating the Golden Cities and Kalgoorlie West deposits, and continuing to target near-mine, shallow, and oxide ore extensions to known mineralisation.
Paddington's Reserve and Resource position is updated progressively updated as assessments are completed.
Processing
The 3.3Mtpa Paddington mill, based on conventional carbon-in-pulp technology, is large, efficient, low cost and a strategic asset in the Goldfields. Mill performance has been excellent since Norton took over with availability for the year better than planned.
The plant comprises a cone crusher, a ball and SAG mill grinding circuit, gravity recovery and cyanide leaching. Gold is extracted from slurry in the leaching circuit and onto activated carbon before pumping the carbon to an elution column to wash gold into a solution. The gold-bearing solution is then passed through a series of electro-winning cells that deposit the gold onto stainless steel cathodes. The cathodes are rinsed to yield a gold sludge that is dried then smelted into gold doré bars containing ~75% gold. The bars are sent to the mint for refining into gold bullion.
Production
Historical gold production is summarised below: |
