Cortona worked tirelessly to design a state-of-the-art operation
which utilises the very latest technology to ensure the project,
located near the communities of Majors Creek and Braidwood some
60
kilometres from Canberra, is friendly to the environment and
the community. The region itself was a major historic goldfield,
producing around 1.2 million ounces in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“
It is now ‘all systems go’ and I think we have secured broad
community support for the development, which will bring much
needed investment, employment and opportunity to the region,”
Mr Van der Borgh said.
Based on a high-grade resource of gold, Dargues Reef will
have a tiny footprint, comprising a small but highly efficient
underground mine feeding a nearby 330,000 tonnes per annum
processing facility.
Dargues Reef will have a ‘partial’ processing plant which will
produce a gold concentrate rather than gold bars. The metallurgy
of the ore is such that half of the gold can be recovered by gravity
methods, with the balance extracted by conventional flotation to
produce a sulphide concentrate that will be shipped off site to the
London Victoria mine near Parkes, some 400 kilometres away,
for further treatment.
The mine is scheduled to produce around 50,000 ounces per year
over an initial six-year period at a forecast C1 cash unit operating
cost of just over $700 per ounce.
At a gold price of $1,600 it is estimated to generate free cash flow
of around $150 million, generate 100 jobs during the construction
phase and around 80 long-term jobs during operations, many of
which will be filled locally.
Importantly, there is enormous upside to these numbers – both
from the potential for a rising gold price and from resource growth
from near-mine exploration.
Cortona ready to roll at
PETER VAN DER BORGH
MANAGING DIRECTOR
CORTONA RESOURCES LTD
Right: Dargues Reef drill core with visible gold
Bottom right: Drilling at Dargues Reef
DarguesReef goldmine
State-of-the-art technology, innovative design and a proactive
approach to community relations has enabled the Dargues Reef
gold project in New South Wales to become the state’s first gold
mine in over eight years to receive government approval.
In August this year, just as the Diggers and Dealers mining
forum was getting into full swing, Cortona Resources Managing
Director Peter van der Borgh had a few other things on his mind.
The Perth-based junior had just received the final regulatory
approval required for its flagship Dargues Reef gold project to
proceed. The relatively innocuous approval, from the Parkes Shire
Council in NSW, was for modification and use of the mothballed
London Victoria gold plant (once owned and operated by
BHP Billiton) for the off-site processing of gold concentrate
produced at Dargues.
For Mr van der Borgh and his team, it marked the final
step in a long and arduous approvals process spanning more than
18
months, positioning Cortona as one of the few Australian-listed
gold companies with a greenfields gold project now on the cusp
of financing and development.
MINESITE 2012
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