Pangea Geosystems has recently finished commissioning a Leica GeoMoS driven prism monitoring system across two mine sites in Laos that are operated by PanAust namely, the Phu Kham Copper-Gold Operation and the Ban Houaxyai Gold-Silver Operation.
The Phu Kham Copper-Gold Operation is located within PanAust's Phu Bia Mining Contract Area in Laos approximately 140 kilometres from the capital city, Vientiane. Phu Kham is PanAust's flagship operation.
The Operation comprises an open-pit mine feeding ore to a process plant with recovery of copper and precious metals into a saleable concentrate using conventional flotation technology. The concentrate contains between 23 and 25 per cent copper, 9 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and up to 60g/t silver.
The award-winning Ban Houayxai Gold-Silver Operation is located approximately 25 kilometres west of Phu Kham and comprises an open-pit mine feeding ore to a conventional 4 million tonnes per annum carbon in leach (CIL) process plant.
Excellent production and cost performances were achieved at Ban Houayxai for the full 2015 year with new annual records set for gold and silver production as well as costs.
An existing Trimble T4D prism monitoring system was already in place at each site utilising a single Trimble S8 total station at each operation however the decision was made to migrate the existing systems over to Leica GeoMoS whilst expanding coverage at both sites by adding an additional automated Leica TM50 total station to each of the operations.
Although the Trimble T4D software and the S8 total stations were replaced with Leica solutions, Pangea Geosystems was able to utilise some of the existing equipment in order to keep the costs associated with changing to Leica to a minimum.
Future growth at these operations is anticipated and Pangea Geosystems looks forward to working with PanAust to continue to deliver world class monitoring solutions as these projects evolve.