Toronto, Ontario / TheNewswire / November 1, 2017 - Latin American Minerals Inc. (TSXV: LAT) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that the company has smelted its first gold dore bar weighing 149.7 grams since last producing gold in 2015. The Company's first attempt at reprocessing the tailings used a gravity process which lost much of the fine gold. The strategy to move to a VAT leach only operation commenced 45 days ago with this initial trial production under the stewardship of the new COO Bira de Oliveira, P.Eng., MBA, PMP, PhD.
Mr. de Oliveira has implemented an agitation process in the leaching stage and changed the method of loading the VATs from slurrying to truck loading material directly to the VATs. This will both increase the concentration of the pregnant solution by decreasing the use of fresh water, as well as decrease the loading time of each VAT. Both of these changes will lead to greater operational efficiency as the company moves towards stable commercial production.
The Company, under Mr. de Oliveira's leadership, is working to finalize improvements in the absorption, desorption and regeneration process with new materials being ordered and final testing of equipment underway.
Mathew Wilson, President and CEO stated "We realize this has been a long road for shareholders over the last two years and are pleased to report today's encouraging step towards consistent commercial production. In only a short period of time Mr. de Oliveira has managed to recover gold in solution for us to process, pour, and light the way to a stable and profitable operation. I am very proud of the work that the team has done to stabilize recoveries of gold-in-solution and am confident that the missteps and inefficiencies of the previous plant and processing design will soon be behind us".
About the Company
Latin American Minerals Inc. is a mineral exploration and gold mining company which holds its core gold projects in Paraguay. The Company is currently expanding its Independencia Mine gold processing plant to encompass vat-leach gold recovery from mineralization extracted in open pit bulk mining activities at its fully permitted mining concession.
Management has identified exploration targets at Independencia Mine, and six new gold zones on the Company's adjacent exploration claims, for drill testing. This property package comprises the Company's 15,020 hectare Paso Yobai gold project.
Qualified Person
The scientific and technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Paul Sarjeant, P.Geo., a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Sarjeant is Vice President of Exploration.
