The Veladero gold mine is one of the largest gold mines in Argentina, and in the world. It is located 189 miles/305 km northwest of San Juan, at a height between 4000 and 4850 meters above sea level and located in the San Juan province of Argentina, immediately to the south of the Pascua-Lama property, Veladero gold mine in the highly prospective Frontera district.
The Veladero mine property contains several large deposits of gold and silver mineralisation in altered, silicified volcanic rock, and various types of silicified breccia. Main-stage mineralisation is superimposed on the Miocene volcanic vent complex of diatreme breccias, associated pyroclastic rocks, flow domes, and porphyry intrusions
Process of mining in Veladero gold mine Argentina is a conventional mining open-pit operation where ore is crushed by a two-stage crushing process with drilling and blasting of ore and waste. Mineral rock transported and carried by a conventional truck with shovel operation and transported via overland conveyor and trucks to the leach pad area.
The processing gold mining plant in Veladero Argentina was completed September of 2005 and uses both enriched solution and cyanide solutions to extract the gold from the low-grade ore removed from the mine.
Conventional open-pit mining methods and recovers gold , These include crushed mineral ore leaching The mined ore mineral is crushed into small chunks and heaped on leach pad where it can be irrigated with a leach solution to dissolve the valuable metals. While sprinklers are occasionally used for irrigation, more often operations use drip irrigation to minimize evaporation, provide more uniform distribution of the leach solution, and avoid damaging the exposed mineral. The solution then percolates through the heap and leaches both the target and other minerals, this process, called the "leach cycle," The leach solution containing the dissolved minerals is then collected, treated in a process plant to recover the target mineral, and then recycled to the heap after reagent levels are adjusted.
The crushed ore is irrigated with a dilute alkaline cyanide solution. The solution containing the dissolved precious metals ("pregnant solution") continues percolating through the crushed ore until it reaches the liner at the bottom of the heap where it drains into a storage (pregnant solution) pond. After separating the precious metals from the pregnant solution, the dilute cyanide solution (now called "barren solution") is normally re-used in the heap-leach-process or occasionally sent to an industrial water treatment facility where the residual cyanide is treated and residual metals are removed
Barrick Gold, the owner, selected Victaulic as the pipe joining method for the large and small diameter processing lines at the plant. Constructing the pipeline using Style 77 flexible grooved couplings meant Barrick was able to achieve their fast-track project schedule, while welding and flanging would have led to overruns. Another benefit of choosing the Victaulic method is the inherent flexibility of Style 77 couplings, which allowed for pipeline deflection. Vic-300 MasterSeal® butterfly valves were also utilized to maximize efficiency of the grooved system and contend with high pressure rating requirements.
Veladero gold mine Argentina have produced 722,000 ounces of gold in 2014 at all-in sustaining costs of $815 per ounce. Proven and probable mineral reserves as at December 31, 2014, were 4.7 million ounces of gold2. Gold production in 2015 is expected to be 575,000-625,000 ounces and all-in sustaining costs are anticipated to be $990-$1,035 per ounce.
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