Princess louise

The Princess Louise open cut gold mining operation in the Northern Territory is owned by Canadian based gold mining company Crocodile Gold. The company is currently mining gold at three other operation in the Northern Territory besides the Princess Louise deposit, these being; Mottrams, North Point and Howley.

The Princess Louise Open pit Mine is Part of the Burnside Tenements
The Princess Louise gold deposit is situated in the same corridor as the Fountain Head and Tally Ho mines located 150 kilometres south of Darwin, within the Burnside tenements. Development of the Princess Louise open pit gold project commenced in the second quarter of 2010. The mine is being operated using traditional open cut mining methods of drilling, blasting, and hauling the gold bearing ore to the gold treatment plant at the nearby Union Reef mill that came into production in 2010.

The Burnside tenements of which the Princess Louise open pit mine is a part, belongs to the wider Cosmo/Howley corridor. This corridor consists of several gold deposits that take in the proposed Cosmo underground gold mining operation as well as the Howley open pit. There is a 200 personnel mining camp adjacent to the gold deposits that is used by the miners when rostered on duty. Gold recovered from the Princess Louise Mine averages around 90 percent.

Gold Mining in the Princess Louise Mine Site Region Dates Back to the 1800's
The Burnside gold mining tenement area is part of the gold mining history of the Northern Territory that can be traced back to the 1800's. It became well known for the size of the gold nuggets being discovered in the area, with the largest weighing in at 700 ounces.

In 1901, a three compartment shaft was sunk at North Point that included two cross cuts. These cross cuts were driven in a westerly direction, one at 42 metres and the other at 62 metres. The lodes in the 62 metre cross cut returned an average of five grams of gold to a tonne of ore over a width of 20 metres.

In 1891 the old Princess Louise mine that was situated near where the North Point mine was to be developed 10 years later, was already in production, producing 2,422 tonnes of gold bearing ore that graded at 51 grams of gold per tonne. The vein was four metres wide with shoots plunging in a northerly direction at 30 degrees. Little gold mining took place in the area after the mid 1910's for the next 60 years, until gold mining company, GBS Gold Australia, explored the area around both the North Point and Princess Louise's old mine sites in 2007. Several small alluvial showings in the area were mined spasmodically between 1986 and 1990.

GBS Exploration Revived Interest in the Princess Louise Mine Site Area
The GBS drilling program resulted in gold production taking place in the Howley open pits, as well as completing a feasibility study into underground mining of the Cosmo deposit but the company went into administration before much of its ambitions could be realised. The Howley gold deposit is the most southerly of the Burnside orebodies, located about two kilometres north west of the historic Cosmo open pit.

Princess Louise Ore Processed at the Union Reefs Mill
The Union Reefs mill, where the Princess Louise ore is treated, contains a gravity and carbon-in-leach (CIL) process with a capacity of handling 2.5
million tonnes of ore a year, which equates to 8,000 tonnes a day. The mill is designed to recover coarse gold by means of gravity concentration and fine gold by using the cyanide leaching and adsorption on activated carbon method.
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