Mining and Processing
Mining at the Segovia Operations is sourced from four underground mines using room and pillar or cut and fill mining methods, with the ore hoisted to the surface. Since 2017, the operation also incorporates the processing of ore provided by local informal miners through an artisanal mining model (ASM), which represented 12% and 16% of gold production in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Aris Mining has agreements with 63 third party ASM groups who mine in designated areas. Aris Mining pays for the recovered gold at a fixed price, processes the ore at the Maria Dama plant, and sells the gold/silver.
Ore is processed through the Maria Dama process plant using crushing, grinding, gravity concentration, gold flotation, concentrate regrinding, concentrate cyanidation, Merrill-Crowe zinc precipitation and refining of both the zinc precipitate and gravity concentrate to produce a final gold/silver doré product. The plant is currently undergoing an expansion to increase capacity from 1,500 tonnes per day (tpd) to 2,000 tpd.
A new 200 tpd polymetallic processing plant was built in 2021 to recover zinc, lead, gold and silver from tailings to provide an additional source of cash flow from the mining operations. Tailings from the Maria Dama plant are treated through a filter press operation that produces dry stack tailings which are stored at the El Chocho tailings storage facility.