Gold Assay and Recovery Rates in Karakoram Hard-Rock Deposits: What the Lab Results Actually Show

Last month I sat with a metallurgist in Islamabad going through fire assay certificates from three of our Karakoram concessions. He asked me a question I get from serious buyers all the time: "Sufyan, the grades look fine, but what's the actual recovery?"

That's the right question. And honestly, it's the one most promoters in Pakistan dodge.

Grade sells the dream. Recovery pays the bill.

So let me walk through what the lab work is actually showing on our hard-rock gold prospects across Gilgit-Baltistan — the good, the awkward, and the parts still under investigation.

What the Head Grades Look Like

We've been systematically channel-sampling and diamond-drilling across quartz-vein systems hosted in the Karakoram batholith and the Kohistan island arc contact zones. The mineralisation style is broadly orogenic — shear-hosted quartz-carbonate veins with variable sulphide content, mostly pyrite and arsenopyrite, with subordinate galena and chalcopyrite in some structures.

On one of our northern concessions near Bunji, channel samples across a 1.4 metre vein returned an average of 6.83 g/t Au over the sampled width, with a high of 24.1 g/t in a sulphide-rich hangingwall section. Another set from a parallel structure came back at 3.9 g/t over 2.2 metres.

Second concession, further into the Karakoram — quartz-tourmaline vein swarms cutting granodiorite. Head grades from surface channels: 2.1 to 11.7 g/t Au, with a weighted mean of about 4.6 g/t across 47 samples.

Third one — and this is the interesting one — a broader sulphide zone rather than a discrete vein. Lower grade, 1.2 to 2.8 g/t, but over widths of 6 to 14 metres. That's a different animal entirely. Bulk-mineable if the metallurgy behaves.

Fire assay was done at SGS Islamabad with check assays at a second lab. I insist on check assays. Learned that the hard way early on when a single-lab result led me down a rabbit hole on a prospect that turned out to be nowhere near as consistent as the first batch suggested.

Recovery Is Where It Gets Real

Here's the thing about Karakoram gold. A lot of it is free-milling — coarse to medium grained, sitting in quartz, liberates cleanly at reasonable grind sizes. That's the good news.

Bottle roll cyanidation on composites from the Bunji vein system gave us recoveries of 91.4% at a P80 of 75 microns, 48-hour leach. That's a clean result. No pre-oxidation needed, no roasting, no pressure ox. Standard CIL circuit would do the job.

But — and there's always a but — the sulphide-rich intercepts are a different story. Where arsenopyrite content climbs above roughly 3-4% of the ore, we start seeing refractory behaviour. One composite came back at 62.7% direct cyanide recovery. That's the classic signature of gold locked in the arsenopyrite lattice. To get that up to acceptable numbers you're looking at either fine grinding to sub-20 micron, flotation to concentrate followed by ultrafine grind or bio-oxidation, or straight-up POX (pressure oxidation). None of those are cheap.

Gravity concentration test work has been encouraging on the free-milling material. Knelson concentrator runs on the Bunji composites pulled 43-51% of the gold into a gravity concentrate representing under 1% of the mass. That matters commercially, because a gravity circuit ahead of leaching cuts reagent consumption and gives you a doré option on site.

The broader sulphide zone I mentioned — the lower-grade, wider one — we're still working through the metallurgy. Initial rougher flotation gave a concentrate grading 38 g/t Au at about 84% recovery to concentrate. That's shippable material to a smelter that pays for gold credits, or feed for on-site further processing depending on the JV structure.

What This Means for a Buyer or JV Partner

Look, I'm not going to sit here and claim every one of our 16 concessions is a Tier 1 gold deposit. That's not honest and serious mining people can smell it a mile off.

What the data does support:

• Multiple hard-rock gold occurrences with head grades in the 3-7 g/t range from surface work, with narrower high-grade shoots running higher
• Predominantly free-milling metallurgy on the vein-hosted material, with cyanide recoveries in the high 80s to low 90s
• Refractory behaviour in specific sulphide-rich zones that will need appropriate flowsheet design — not a deal-breaker, but a cost input
• Coarse gold component that responds well to gravity, which changes the capex conversation

What the data does not yet support, and I'll say this plainly: JORC or NI 43-101 compliant resources. We're at the advanced exploration stage on the best prospects, not the feasibility stage. Anyone telling you otherwise about ground in Gilgit-Baltistan right now is either misinformed or hoping you are.

That's exactly why we're structuring the current conversations as JV or earn-in rather than off-take on a producing operation. The gold's there. The metallurgy is workable. What's needed is drill density, a proper resource estimate, and a bankable study — and that's the capital and technical partnership we're set up for.

On the alluvial side — the Indus, Gilgit and Hunza placer material — the recovery story is completely different and much simpler. Sluice and centrifuge recoveries are running above 85% on the coarse fraction. But that's a separate post and a separate commercial conversation.

If you're evaluating Karakoram gold seriously, the questions to ask any operator are these. What lab. What check-assay protocol. What sulphide content in the mineralised zone. What P80 was the recovery figure quoted at. And has anyone actually done a locked-cycle test, or are we still talking bottle rolls?

If they can't answer those five, you already know what you're looking at.