Laverton Gold Project
Location:
Laverton, Western Australia (250km, north-north-east of Kalgoorlie, WA).
Related Projects:
Laverton Gold Project - Presentation Snapshot Mining Operations:
Crescent has successfully negotiated an Ore Purchase Agreement (OPA) with subsidiaries of Barrick Gold for the sale of Crescent’s gold ore to Barrick for processing at their Granny Smith mill.
On 19 April 2010 Crescent announced that it had extended its existing Laverton OPA with Barrick for a further two years, to a four-year term. For more information on the OPA please refer to the Company’s announcements dated 23 February 2009 , 15 June 2009 and 19 April 2010 .
Crescent commenced mining and haulage operations in August 2009, with the first batch of ore processed at Granny Smith in the 30 December 2009 quarter.
The Laverton Gold Project is a medium scale operation with 240 personnel on site. The target production of 100,000 ounces of gold places Crescent in the Top 10 Australian listed gold producers.
The current mine schedule provides for the mining and processing of approximately 640,000 tonnes of ore per quarter. Crescent’s mine plan takes into account that the Company will be sourcing ore from a number of different pits (a minimum of two and a maximum of four at any one time).
Exploration:
The Laverton Greenstone Belt is one of the best gold endowed Archaean greenstone belts within the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia. The Laverton region, rich in mining history, has seen extensive exploration, development and production with over 28 million ounces gold produced from the area. Major gold mines include Granny Smith, Sunrise and Wallaby - all discovered in the last twenty years. While work at Laverton has been extensive, there remains exciting potential for extending existing mines, development of known deposits into mines and exploration for new discoveries.
The majority of Crescent's exploration success to date has been achieved through relatively shallow drilling to develop open pit ore reserves. Future exploration will target mineralization at depth and along the well-established structural corridors which host the known deposits. The project contains numerous exploration opportunities including extensions to existing open pit resources, high grade underground targets, and conceptual large scale, bulk mining targets. The Laverton area hosts several large, multi-million ounce deposits with the majority of high-grade mineralization and underground development starting at 200 metres depth. At this time less than 2% of all drill holes drilled at Crescent’s Laverton Gold Project penetrate depths below 150 metres.
Significant upside potential remains at many of Crescent’s deposits and advance stage exploration targets in addition to the vast potential of high-grade mineralization at depths. There are significant acquisition opportunities for the many known deposits in the immediate region, which the company is actively pursuing.
Resources and Reserves:
Mineral Resource and Ore Reserves were updated at Crescent’s Laverton Project as of 30 June 2010.
Click here for Crescent's Reserve and Resource Statement
Project Development Activities
The Company continues to develop its Laverton gold assets with the strategy of accelerating the economic production of known deposits and ore sources as well as identification of “brown fields” mineralisation in order to extend overall mine life of the project and also to deliver operating flexibility in mining schedules. Current mining plans are scheduled out to December 2016 incorporating several phases of mining and development activity. Crescent is mining from proven and probable resources which allows the Company to schedule mining out to December 2016. Reconciliation of mine grades to forecast grades for the pits mined to date have been accurate to expectations.
