Southern Cross Gold Consolidated (SX2.AX), a company focused on gold and antimony exploration with its primary asset being the Sunday Creek project in Victoria, has announced a significant metallurgical development at its Sunday Creek Gold-Antimony Project. Stage 2 test work has demonstrated successful selective flotation processing, producing a high-grade, low-arsenic antimony-gold concentrate from the upper antimony-rich zones of the deposit. This process also ensures excellent recovery of native gold.
The selective flotation technology utilises specialised collector chemistry to separate antimony minerals from arsenic-bearing minerals. This addresses a key requirement while maintaining excellent gold recovery. Overall gold recovery ranged from 92.3% to 95.6% across three product streams: gravity gold concentrate (37.3 – 51.4% recovered gold), antimony-gold concentrate (28.8 – 36.5% recovered gold), and sulphide concentrate (15.5-18.0% recovered gold). Antimony grades in the antimony-gold concentrate reached 48.2 – 53.1%, with gold grades up to 93.2 g/t and arsenic grades between 0.1% to 0.2%, well below the 0.6% threshold.
The testing included 144 samples from the Apollo and Rising Sun prospects. Processing conditions have been established and are ready for scale-up through locked-cycle testing, pilot plant evaluation, and process plant design, with a target completion date in Q1 2027. According to Michael Hudson, President & CEO, this development significantly de-risks the Sunday Creek project and positions the company to potentially deliver multiple high-value products to market.
Mr. Craig Brown, Metallurgical Consultant to Southern Cross Gold, commented that the selectivity achieved against arsenic in the antimony flotation stage will likely reduce reliance on blending strategies to produce acceptable concentrates. The company considers both gold and antimony that are included in the gold equivalent calculation have reasonable potential to be recovered and sold at Sunday Creek.
