The Porgera Gold mine in the highlands of PNG, treats 5.5 6.0 million tonnes of ore per year with a SAG / Ball Mill grinding circuit. The Anawe processing plant consists of a gold bearing pyrite flotation circuit, 4x autoclaves processing flotation concentrate and a Leach-CIP circuit. This paper describes a range of process improvements in the Anawe processing plant resulting in significant recovery and capacity improvements. These include: installation of a pyrite concentrate export plant (CEP) in 2015 to debottleneck autoclave processing capacity; improvements in autoclave throughput through operational control changes to oxygen addition and feed controls; improved leach circuit control, resulting in improved gold recovery, reagent addition savings and cyanide code compliance; and Acacia recovery optimisation.
CITATION:Gueme, P, Akis, D and Burger, B, 2019. Porgera Gold mine, flotation, autoclave, leaching and acacia reactor improvements, in Proceedings World Gold 2019, pp 545565 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).