Carolin throws ball back into Intergold U.S.A. court

Carolin Mines has thrown the ball back into the court of Intergold U.S.A. which claims to have found extremely high gold and platinum values in Carolin mine tailings (N.M., Feb 16/87).

The company says “Intergold and others have advised the company that its tailings are geologically and metallurgically complex” which could explain the disparities from historical results.

Carolin says Intergold’s preliminary results “can not be relied upon,” noting its recovery process is proprietary and they are unable to verify the process. Recent assays from Carolin’s tailings dump, which were fire assayed, returned only trace amounts of platinum and palladium with minor gold ranging from 0.05 to 0.064 oz per ton.

It is generally accepted that the maximum recoverable gold content in Carolin tailings is about 0.03 oz which, under certain conditions, could be economic at today’s prices. During its brief production period, Carolin’s head grades averaged 0.09 oz gold and recoveries were about 50%.

The recent samples were fire assayed by two laboratories in Canada and two in Arizona and the correlation between the results was excellent. The results were also verified by chemical and other assay techniques.

Intergold is reported to be constructing a 1-3-ton-per-day pilot plant in Nevada which will be used to analyze the 35 tons of sample material collected by Golder Associates in early January. In addition, Intergold has said that a “suitably qualified independent engineer will conduct further recovery testing using Intergold’s proprietary recovery method on a control one- ton composite sample” for verification purposes.

The resulting metals from these two recovery runs will be sent to registered assayers in Canada and the U.S., they say. Intergold did not elaborate on the possibility this concentrate might not be representative of what actually exists in Carolin tailings.