Nestled in the high-rainfall region of Mindanao, Philippines, the Kingking Copper-Gold Project stands as one of Southeast Asia’s most significant undeveloped porphyry deposits. Managed by St. Augustine Gold and Copper Limited, this world-class asset is poised to become a major producer of copper concentrate and cathode, alongside substantial gold and silver by-products. The project’s location in the Philippines, a country with a rich mining history, positions it to be a key contributor to the global supply of critical metals. The comprehensive processing facility, designed for a nameplate capacity of 60,000 tonnes per day (tpd), employs a sophisticated hybrid flowsheet to efficiently recover metals from both sulfide and oxide ore types, representing a benchmark in modern, integrated mineral processing design.
- Location & Ownership: Situated in Mindanao, Philippines, the project is owned and operated by St. Augustine Gold and Copper Limited (SAGC).
- Production Target: The facility is designed to process 21.9 million tonnes of ore annually, equivalent to a 60,000 tpd throughput rate.
- Primary Processing Route: A hybrid flowsheet combining conventional flotation for sulfide ores with agitated leaching of flotation tails and dedicated heap leaching for oxide ores.
- Final Products: The circuit produces a high-grade copper concentrate for smelting, gold-silver doré bullion from gravity recovery, and high-purity LME-grade copper cathodes from solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX-EW).
- Crushing Circuit: Run-of-mine (ROM) ore is primary crushed by a 60” x 110” gyratory crusher, set to a 180 mm product, and conveyed 3.4 km to separate 200,000-tonne capacity coarse ore stockpiles for sulfide and oxide treatment.
- Grinding Circuit: A conventional SABC (SAG-Ball mill-Pebble Crusher) configuration is used. The circuit features a massive 12.2m x 7.3m EGL, 28 MW gearless drive SAG mill and two 8.23m x 12.8m, 20 MW ball mills, targeting a grind size of 80% passing 106 microns for flotation.
- Flotation & Regrind: Copper sulfide minerals are recovered using 14 large 300 m³ rougher flotation cells. The rougher concentrate is reground to 80% passing 20 microns in two 300 kW vertical mills before undergoing three stages of cleaning to achieve smelter-grade concentrate.
- Gravity Gold Recovery: A dedicated circuit bleeds a stream from the cyclone underflow to Knelson or Falcon concentrators, followed by intensive cyanidation and electrowinning to produce doré bullions, accounting for 17% of overall gold recovery.
- Agitated Leach for Tails: Flotation tailings from oxide-dominant ore are leached for 4 hours in a series of agitated tanks at 50°C with 25 kg/t of sulfuric acid. Copper is recovered from the pregnant solution via a 6-stage Counter-Current Decantation (CCD) circuit feeding the SX-EW plant.
- Heap Leach for Oxides: Oxide ore is crushed to 80% minus 20 mm, agglomerated with 6 kg/t of acid, and stacked in 6-meter lifts on an “on-off” pad. It is irrigated for a 60-day leach cycle plus a 7-day rinse, with the pregnant solution reporting to the central SX-EW facility.
- Solvent Extraction & Electrowinning (SX-EW): A central plant with two parallel mixer-settler trains and four banks of EW cells processes pregnant solution from both the agitated leach and heap leach operations to produce LME-grade copper cathodes.
- Tailings Management: Emphasizing sustainability, all tailings are dewatered using high-rate thickeners and belt filters to ~15% moisture for dry-stack disposal, significantly reducing environmental footprint and water consumption.
- Water & Power: The entire operation requires 855.6 m³/h of freshwater makeup. Power consumption is estimated at 1.051 billion kWh annually, or 26.4 kWh per tonne of ore processed.
- Cyanide Code Compliance: The gravity gold circuit includes a SO2-Air cyanide destruction system to treat effluent to ICMC standards (<50 ppm WAD cyanide), with plans for full Cyanide Code certification upon operation.
- Key Reagents: Major consumables include Lime (1,360 g/t), Limestone (3,600 g/t), Xanthate collectors (38 g/t), and Sulfuric Acid for leaching.
Source: NI 43-101 Technical Report | Feasibility | Project: Gold Project | Date: July 2025
