The gold mining company Altynalmas JSC has unveiled its mining plan for the Bakhtai deposit, located in the Aktogay district of Kazakhstan’s Karaganda region. The plan was presented on the Unified Environmental Portal of Kazakhstan. According to the project documentation, the Bakhtai deposit has never been developed before, although geological exploration of the site has been ongoing since the last century. From 2018 to 2021, the company drilled 52 boreholes and collected 30,000 samples.
The Bakhtai deposit is situated within 100 km of one of Altynalmas’ main assets, the Pustynnoe mining and processing complex, where the gold-bearing ore from the new deposit will be processed. The company plans to extract the ore using open-pit mining. The mineral resources were evaluated according to the KAZRC code and were registered in 2021. The identified reserves are estimated at 1.23 million tons of ore (containing 2,328 kg of gold with an average grade of 1.89 g/t), with inferred resources at 577,000 tons (containing 698 kg of gold with an average grade of 1.21 g/t).
The company intends to develop the deposit over a two-year period, with the quarry expected to produce 940,000 tons of ore per year. Following this, Altynalmas plans to conduct further operational exploration work in the Bakhtai ore field.
Notably, the gold mining company recently received an ICMI certificate from the International Cyanide Management Institute for its Pustynnoe deposit.
