Going green gives Vertex Minerals a gold star

By Yolanda Torrisi
Mining stocks investor and PR specialist

Kermit the frog said “it’s not easy being green”. Former Northern Star king and now Develop Managing Director Bill Beament said “it is hard for gold to go green”, but check out Vertex Minerals Limited (“Vertex”) and their journey to being a greener gold company.

Mining stocks investor and PR specialist Yolanda Torrisi chatted with Vertex Executive Chairman Roger Jackson and Technical Director Tully Richards at the Australian Gold Conference held in Sydney recently to discover that here’s a company that has a project (mine, plant and resources) that lends itself to green mining.

The company has undergone an audit undertaken by Socialsuite ESG Go against 21 benchmarks across four main deliverables of People, Planet, Prosperity and Governance and brands itself as an ethical and environmentally sustainable focused gold company.

Vertex has established it can process and recover gold without the use of sodium cyanide, widely used in gold mining operations. It ticks the ESG hurdles with its all-gravity recoverable gold (crushing, grinding, spiral separators and Knelson Concentrators). Recovery is expected at between 90-95%.

Vertex has a mill on site and enough money to carry the project through to PFS and permitting the operations to go into production. The last production at the site was 2010.

Roger Jackson says: “We can do gravity gold and have a benign tailings and may not even need a tailings dam.”

Vertex (ASX:VTX) is relatively new to the ASX bourse having listed on 17 January 2022.

The company was spun out of Perth based Peak Minerals (formerly Pure Alumina and Hill End Gold). Importantly, the directors and management are all new.

Vertex holds the Hill End and Hargraves projects in Central NSW, in fact, their project is where the world’s largest specimen of gold was found 150 years ago – the Holtermann Nugget (containing some 2,750oz of gold!). The town of Hill End will be celebrating that great and iconic event on 22 October this year with a large festival planned.

Vertex sports 250,000oz of gold within JORC compliant resources at their Central New South Wales tenements. Other resources are currently being proved up.

A 2,000 metre drill program, due to start next week, will be the most recent work to be undertaken where historically 1.8 million ounces of gold has historically been produced. Roger Jackson says: “We’re drilling the Red Hill resource to extend it laterally and at depth. Furthermore, we have numerous strong exploration targets across 14km of strike.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yolanda Torrisi is not a shareholder in Vertex at the time of writing this news article. This news article has not been commissioned by Vertex and has been written by the author showing an interest in a company leveraging itself differently to its peers.