Kazakhstan Silk Road Energy Co., Ltd., a private company, plans to begin mining at the Chandy-Bulak placer gold deposit in the Kurchum district of the East Kazakhstan region, the company announced in a statement announcing its planned activities.
“Open-pit mining of the Chandy-Bulak placer gold deposit, with a maximum production rate of 79,360 tons over a period of 180 days. The proposed project is the ‘Mining Plan for the Development of the Chandy-Bulak Placer Gold Deposit, Located in the Kurchum District of the East Kazakhstan Region,'” the statement announcing its planned activities reads.
The deposit is located 30 km southeast of the village of Bolshenarymskoye and 20 km northwest of the village of Maralikha. The deposit is planned to be mined in blocks—open-pit mining in isolated pits. The pits will be developed alternately during the 2027 season.
The company estimated the total volume of gold-bearing sands at 49,600 cubic meters. To extract them, 222,500 cubic meters of overburden above the sands will need to be removed.
The Chandy-Bulak Stream flows through the site. The primary sources of gold are gold-bearing quartz veins and zones of contiguous quartz veins. The distribution of gold in the placer is uneven. The gold is predominantly fine (0.5-1.0 mm), lamellar, medium-rounded, and has a fineness of 900.
Accompanying minerals include rutile, cassiterite, scheelite, and pyrite. The gold grade in the sands is uneven. There are isolated areas of sand with a nested distribution of gold grades. The average gold grade is 1.517 grams per cubic meter.
Before mining begins, a bulldozer will remove the topsoil, which will be loaded into a SHACMAN dump truck and transported to a topsoil storage facility. The bulldozer will then excavate the placer, from where the sand will also be transported by trucks to another storage facility, where it will be processed.
The site is powered by an AD 300-T400 diesel generator, which will be installed on the same site as the pumping station. The pumping station’s electric motor, which will supply water to the process unit, will consume the majority of the power. Daily diesel fuel consumption is stated at 280 liters.
You can see the typical operation of the process unit in recordings of the “Gold Rush” reality show on the Discovery Channel, where several teams compete to extract the maximum amount of gold in a season. Gold mining at the mine will be conducted seven days a week in two 10-hour shifts. Preparatory work is planned to begin in 2026, with mining itself scheduled to run from May to October 2027. Cleanup of the mine’s aftermath is scheduled for 2028.
Kazakhstan Silk Road Energy Co., Ltd., a private company, was registered on July 9, 2025, at the Astana International Financial Center. Its first director and sole owner is Li Huhu.
This is a AI-translated version of the original article in Russian
