Lahontan Gold Corp. announced it has begun metallurgical test work at its Santa Fe Mine, a past-producing open pit, heap-leach gold and silver mine located in Mineral County, Nevada. The program is designed to verify historic gold and silver recoveries from oxide mineralization at Santa Fe, and to provide baseline metallurgical data that can be used to design process flowsheets for any future mining operations.

The first phase of testing will be a series of bottle-roll tests utilizing reverse-circulation drill cuttings which will allow the Company to characterize different mineralization types within the oxidized portion of the Santa Fe mineral resource. Previous bottle-roll tests produced gold recoveries in oxidized rock of up to 88.9% with CN consumption averaging 0.25kg/tonne. Subsequent testing will include defining optimizing crushing size for potential future heap-leach processing, column leach tests, and evaluating agglomeration to improve precious metal recoveries.