Richard Fifer Carles embarked on a project of responsible and modern mining, we invite you to discover it with us.
The venture is called the Molejón Project, it is located in Cerro Petaquilla (hill) in the Donoso district of the province of Colon.
The Mine
Engineer Lazaro Rodriguez
Three areas are developed here and are the ones we will be seeing right now, Planning defines what is moved from where to where and when, Geology verifies whether the plan complies with the reserves we have, and Operations executes the plan.
How?
With heavy equipment, drilling and blasting with explosives. That execution is provided as a service by PDI in moving earth drilling.
Once this is developed, the mineral is ready for the process. What happens to our mineral is that it is not visible, it consists of particles dispersed in the rest of the materials, our process starts with a physical process of grinding.
Why grind? Because this tiny gold particle, which is associated with the rest of the materials, must be exposed, and the first step to expose it is to reduce the size of the rock to a minimum.
In our process of crushing and grinding, we reduce these particles to a size of 74 microns, which allows the exposure of the gold particle and allows our reactive to reach and separate from the material.
By then, in the first stage of milling, we have been able to seperate our first gold particle and then, as Rafael was explaining, a thickening process begins where liquids are separated from solids, but why do we separate them?
Because that gold particle that is already released, is immediately sent to the refinery for the activated carbon to treat it, and the rest of the gold particles that were not detached are sent to a lixiviation process, which will grant it residence, time simply to allow the cyanide, as a reagent, to act and release the particle, and then it is also sent to activated coal.
Two coals full of gold and silver particles. That is sent to processing in the refinery, and these particles are then removed from the coals and sent to a gold concentrate, that gold concentrate is dried and subsequently melted and the result is a dore bar, which is the same particle that we have been releasing, either in an early stage or after some residence time.
The gold and silver are melted, and become a doré bar, so that our final product in the processing plant is a bar that has a gold concentrate and a silver concentrate which, depending on the area where the pit comes from, can range from a 70-30 to a 50-50
