PPX Mining Corp. announced additional metallurgical results of test work carried out by BaseMet Laboratories from Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada; confirming that significant increase in recovery of gold can be obtained by using a particular treatment process. Past test work, as well as historic results from toll treatment plants used to process ore have shown that only 74% - 80% recovery of gold can be obtained by direct oxide ore leaching.

The reason for this low recovery was suggested by recent results confirming that finer grinding reduced the gold recovery. This situation is common in ore containing naturally occurring carbon, which adsorbs gold from the leach solution when using finer grinding, favouring the liberation of carbon. This phenomenon is denominated "preg-robbing", process in which the gold is adsorbed by the carbon, reporting directly to the tailings and lost.

Test work has been carried out using carbon in leach, where activated carbon is added to a slurry of the ground ore prior to adding cyanide, so the large particles (2 - 4 mm) of activated carbon capture the gold and silver in preference to the naturally occurring carbon. The large particles of carbon can then be separated by screening and gold and silver are recovered from the carbon by using the usual elution process. The overall process is denominated Carbon-in-Leach (CIL).

A sample of 61 kg was taken from a typical breccia at the 3,056 meter elevation in the mine. Data from above table shows 10.6% higher gold recoveries with CIL than with oxide leaching, while silver recoveries are slightly lower. As most of the revenue is derived from the gold, a CIL recovery profile results in a significant increase in revenue.

Based on this metallurgical information, the Company is reconsidering the plant design for its Igor Project from Merrill Crowe to CIL.