Located on the Sumatra Island, Indonesia, the Martabe plant consists of crushing, grinding, leaching/CIL, carbon regeneration, cyanide detoxification, tailings storage facility and water polishing to produce a gold/silver product.
The plant throughput is 4.5 Mt/y (563 t/h) of ore at a nominal life of mine grade of 1.9 g/t gold and 25 g/t silver, producing 206 000 oz/a of gold and 1 990 000 oz/a of silver. The plant was designed with provision for a future upgrade to 6.6 Mt/y. Ausenco’s scope covered the EPCM of the 4.5 Mt/y gold/silver plant and associated infrastructure, including the water polishing plant, air services, earthworks, drainage and the accommodation camp.
- The plant and infrastructure were designed to cope with a highly seismic location
- The plant is located in a high rainfall area, which made earthworks challenging, and influenced the design of the plant, in particular civil/structural design
- Mercury and copper were catered for in the plant design.
On September 24th 2011 the Chairman of G Resources presented Ausenco with an award for achieving 1,000,000 man hours LTI free on the project. This achievement demonstrates Ausenco’s ability to work safely and effectively under challenging conditions. The plant continues to perform well with G-Resources Group posting a record first quarter for 2015. The strong performance continued into the second quarter with the mine and process plant treating 993,000 tonnes of ore at 2.81 grams/tonne head grade.