Turaco impressed by gold extraction near 90% from Cote d’Ivoire play

Having announced late last year that it was acquiring a majority stake in the Afema gold play in the Cote d’Ivoire, Turaco Gold Ltd (ASX:TCG) has progressed to testing its mineralisation through metallurgical work which has pulled extraction rates of around 90 percent for various types of ore.

Diamond drilled core at the Woulo Woulo prospect was used to form three composites for testing, these coming from oxide, transitional and fresh mineralisation. The extraction rates for each were 93.9, 88.2 and 89.4 percent respectively, through a process of cyanide leaching over 48 hours.

The initial gold grades for each composite were 1.21 grams per tonne for oxide, 1.35 grams per tonne for transitional, and 1.31 grams per tonne for fresh ore.

Turaco Gold managing director, Justin Tremain said the testing had shown a strong potential for the type of ore found at Afema, in the country’s south-east.

“This initial metallurgical test work has confirmed our expectation that Woulo Woulo has excellent metallurgical characteristics across oxide, transitional and primary mineralisation, confirming previous preliminary ‘bottle rolls’,” he said.

“We expect optimisation test work on Woulo Woulo will demonstrate low consumption of cyanide and lime.“

The recent testing follows on from Turaco’s earlier metallurgical work (‘bottle rolls’) on 24 drill core samples containing average grades of 1.42 grams per tonne of gold, which showed an average extraction rate of 94.6 percent from oxide/saprock and 88.7 percent from fresh samples.

Turaco now intends to move into a further stage of metallurgical work, testing the theory that gold can be extracted from the project through low consumption of cyanide, as well as moving into testing of fresh core samples taken from various deposits along the Afema Shear.

Turaco Gold has been trading at 17c.