El Corpus, Honduras- April 2, 2013–  The end of March saw the first complete month’s production of the newly installed and commissioned ADR plant at the mine in El corpus, Honduras.  We are excited to report that the results of the first month with all of the various elements of the plant appear to validate the cost and time that has been devoted to the expansion and updating of the mine operations over the past eighteen months. 

Gold production at the plant in the first quarter of the year has exceeded production in 2012 by over 700% and we believe that this will continue to increase.

 

Although the actual launch of the plant with all of its various components operational has been delayed almost four months longer than we expected, the wait has been well worth the time.  As we continue to optimize the plant’s operating capacity as well as increasing the crushing and recovery field loading processes, we are optimistic that we will achieve our goals of producing 1,000 ounces of gold each month. 

There are many areas of production where we can streamline operations to get to the point where we will be loading the recovery field with 500 tons of ore per day, which is the amount of ore needed to meet our production goals.  Since we began loading the recovery field, we have loaded approximately 250 tons per day and now that the plant is operating, we can begin to increase that to the targeted amount of 500 tons per day.  Our experience with the ADR plant shows that it will process all of the gold bearing solution coming from the recovery field with no difficulty.

 

The image below is of dore bars produced on-site after 1 month of the mine’s operations prior to expansion.  The same amount of gold represented in this photo is now produced on a weekly basis.