Abstract
The price of gold continues to set record highs, companies continue to explore, and several new operations have come into production over the last 20 years, particularly in Canada. This paper focuses on the projects that have moved from exploration, to testing, to operation, and the time required during start up (the “ramp-up” time). It is known in the mining industry that commissioning and ramp-up can be very costly and extra time is often required to reach target throughput. The gold industry has a good record when it comes to ramp-up and this will be explored and discussed. A number of case studies will be discussed, and different gold ore processing flowsheets will be compared. Several papers have covered this topic over the years, but the main objective of this paper is to focus on how rapidly gold processing plants achieve ramp-up / production targets.