In May 2006 STRACON Mining Limited entered into an alliance agreement with Oceana Gold New Zealand Limited (OGNZL) to undertake the mining at OGNZL's Globe Progress Mine, located near Reefton on the West Coast of the South Island, for a period of seven years.
The mine is a 24/7 operation and STRACON employs 110 staff.
Current operations are focused on the Globe Progress, General Gordon and Empress pits. Operations to open the fourth Souvenir pit arescheduled to start towards the end of the project life. The floor of the main Globe Progress pit is planned to be 275 m below the highest point of the original surface. Bench heights are 2.5 m in ore and up to 5 m in waste.
Ore zones are delineated by close grid percussion drilling and sampling, and are only mined during daylight when on-the-spot visual checking is possible. Ore is stockpiled on site and processed via primary crusher, ball mill, sizing, floatation, thickening and filtration to concentrate stage.
The concentrate is trucked some 10km to Reefton railway yard in specially constructed steel hoppers which fit on flatbed rail cars. These are transported to Macraes Gold Mine in East Otago via Palmerston, where final extraction and smelting is carried out.
