Cerro Moro is a gold and silver mining project developed by Yamana Gold in the Santa Cruz Province of southern Argentina. The project contains a number of narrow vein high-grade deposits, which will be mined using both open-pit and underground mining methods. The plant’s capacity is 1,000 tonnes per day and includes crushing, grinding and flotation.
After completing a feasibility study in 2015, Yamana implemented an infill drilling program and mandated BBA to update the open-pit and underground mine designs and to prepare a new optimized mine plan using the revised mineral resource estimate. BBA was mandated to perform the following tasks, which were completed using 10 block models and resulted in the design and scheduling of 14 open-pit and 6 underground mines:
The most interesting aspect of this project was the way we estimated mining dilution and ore loss for the open pits. We used Mineable Stope Optimizer, an application originally developed for stope design in underground mines. We have since repeated the same method for a narrow vein open‑pit lithium deposit in northern Québec.