Kavango Commissions 50-Tonne-a-Day Gold Plant in Zimbabwe

Kavango Resources has received regulatory approval to operate a 50-tonne-per-day gold processing plant at its Hillside Gold Project in Zimbabwe, completing a key step in its plans to increase production from its local mining operations.

Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Mines and Mining Development authorised the commissioning of the plant and its associated tailings storage facility on 30 October. Kavango announced the milestone on 2 November, describing the facility as a pilot plant designed to test its processing methods and generate data for a larger commercial operation.

Testing gold recovery at Hillside

The plant processes material through crushing, milling, gravity concentration and a carbon-in-leach (CIL) circuit, which extracts gold from the processed material.

Kavango has reported an increase in gold recovered during the plant’s elution process, from 397 grams in August to 539 grams in September. Elution separates gold from the activated carbon used in the CIL circuit.

The company expects gold recoveries of between 90% and 93% under commercial operating conditions. Laboratory tests on blends of ore from the Bill’s Luck and Nightshift deposits achieved recoveries above 95%, although laboratory results do not necessarily translate directly into performance at operating scale.

Bill’s Luck provides the resource base

The Hillside project includes the Bill’s Luck underground deposit, which has a reported mineral resource of 33,900 ounces of gold at an average grade of 2.68 grams per tonne.

Kavango intends to use operating and metallurgical data from the 50-tonne-per-day plant to refine its processing design and guide the development of a larger commercial facility. The pilot plant will help the company assess how its processing circuit performs under operating conditions before committing to a bigger installation.

Infrastructure work is continuing alongside the commissioning milestone. Kavango is developing a 13-metre headframe at the Bill’s Luck Main Vertical Shaft and upgrading power and water supplies to support further development at Hillside.

The 50-tonne-per-day facility is therefore an intermediate step rather than the project’s final production scale. Its operating results will help determine how Kavango develops the next phase of processing capacity at Hillside.