Labyrinth Resources Limited announced outstanding metallurgical results from its comprehensive testwork which demonstrate a clear, efficient processing pathway for its 500,000oz Labyrinth gold project in Quebec, Canada. The results will help underpin optimisation studies across the Labyrinth Project, initial plant design costings and assessment of any third-party ore sales, toll treatment or concentrate sales. Labyrinth Chief Executive Matt Nixon said: "These are excellent metallurgical results demonstrating that can deliver 95.2% gold recoveries using a conventional gravity and flotation circuit.

Details of Testwork: The project commenced in August 2022 with the submission of diamond core crushed residue composites to Base Metallurgical Laboratories Ltd. ("BaseLabs") in British Columbia, Canada. The metallurgical program was derived and managed by JT Metallurgical Services ("JTs") in Perth. The aims of the program were to define the key mineralogical characteristics of the likely mill feed to a future plant, undertake systematic tests reflective of likely flowsheets being gravity/cyanidation and gravity/flotation/cyanidation and conduct comprehensive assays and mineralogical analysis on the flotation concentrate and process streams for flowsheet optimisation and marketing purposes.

BaseLabs were presented with a total of 35 diamond hole crushed residue composites totalling 17.55m @ 6.32g/t Au. These composites originated from a total of five diamond holes representing at least 80% of the known gold mineralisation of the Labyrinth project aiming to reflect the 7g/t Au resource feed grade. Five sub-composites were generated initially for assay prior to producing a single Master Composite which returned 5.60g/t Au and 1.7g/t Ag via BLEG assay (`Bulk Leach Extractable Grade).

Feed Grades and Mineralogy: Initial BLEG testwork on the Master Composite returned a cyanide recovery of 97.1% Au and 99.7% Ag suggesting the ore is free milling. Trace Mineral Search (TMS) on the Master Composite post Heavy Liquid Separation (HLS) identified 33.7% of the gold being liberated with 52.7% associated with pyrite and 10.2% as multiphase (two or more minerals). 98.6% of the liberated gold by occurrence was less than 38 microns in size.

Encouragingly, only 0.5% of the gold was associated with non-sulphide gangue, 100% of the observed gold was present as native gold and targeted pyrite particles were generally well liberated. Gravity/Leaching A 20kg homogenesis split of the Master Composite was ground to P80 300micron then passed through a 3" Knelson concentrator resulting in a 0.5% mass pull concentrate grading 170g/t Au and 15.6% recovery. The recalculated feed grade of 5.73g/t aligned well with the 5.60g/t BLEG grade.

The Knelson concentrate was then leached at intensive conditions replicating either an ILR or Acacia returning a 92.2% gold recovery or 14.4% overall recovery to doré. This relatively low gravity recovery to dor is likely due to the ultrafine gold grain nature of the ore observed in the TMS. 1kg representative splits of the gravity tails containing 85.6% of the gold were reground to P80 75, 106 and 125µm for cyanidation testwork. Leach conditions are considered reflective of typical CIP/CIL plants in the area.

Complete gold dissolution was achieved within 24 hours with the highest overall recovery being 87.2% at P80 75µm. This recovery was lower than the initial BLEG results indicating additional liberation was required. Low cyanide and lime consumptions reflect the absence of common deleterious elements and indicates the dominant sulphide, pyrite is relatively inert. There was no evidence of preg-robbing or preg-borrowing from the dissolution curves.

Flotation Grind sensitivity rougher flotation tests were conducted on 2kg gravity tail splits at conditions conducive for sulphide and free gold recovery with the aim to generate a low mass pull, high grade concentrate for downstream analysis. Commonly applied PAX (100g/t), CuSO4 (100g/t) and MIBC Frother (28g/t) were dosed at natural pH generating five concentrates and a tail to observe gold, silver and sulphur flotation kinetics over 7.5 min float time.