Ballarat

Ballarat is an underground gold mine located 115km northwest of Melbourne in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, in the south-western part of the Lachlan Fold Belt within the Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks of the Bendigo-Ballarat subdivision. The mine has been in operation since 2006, consistently producing about 40kozpa.

The Ballarat Goldfield is positioned in the hanging wall of the crustal-scale Williamson Creek reverse fault, which strikes north-south and dips to the west. Gold mineralisation occurs within discontinuous quartz veins associated with Lower Ordovician sandstones, siltstones and mudstones that are weakly metamorphosed and folded about the north-south trending axes. Approximately 70% of the recovered gold is ‘free’ and separated by gravity methods before being directly smelted into bars, with the other 30% present as sulphide-bound gold which is extracted by cyanide leach.

The mine is owned and operated by Balmaine Gold Pty Ltd. Ballarat is mined by a combination of conventional drive development and open stoping. The mill flowsheet includes a gravity separation circuit with pressure jig separators, Falcon concentrator and tables to recover both direct smeltable gold as well as sulphide concentrate, the latter requiring further processing via a Gekko inline leach reactor.

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Source

Shen Yao Holdings Technical Report titled “Independent Qualified Persons Report for the Ballarat Goldmine, Australia”, effective February 28, 2021