The playbook — gold · September 17, 2026
Liberty Gold's coarse-ore leach tests hit the recovery its mine plan assumed
Seven bulk column tests confirm gold trickles out of run-of-mine rock at 72.4% — the number the Black Pine feasibility study leaned on.
On September 17, Liberty Gold released results from seven bulk column leach tests at its Black Pine gold project in southeast Idaho. This is lab work, not drilling — no rock intercepts, no grades to weigh. The point was simpler: prove the gold actually comes out of the ore at the coarse chunk size the mine will really use. Black Pine is a run-of-mine heap-leach, meaning uncrushed rock (2 to 8 inches) gets stacked in piles and trickled with solution to dissolve the gold. The tests ran on that full-size rock. The weighted-average recovery came in at 72.4% — essentially matching the 70.2% the September feasibility study assumed. All work was done at KCA Labs in Reno, supervised by Gary Simmons, formerly Newmont’s Director of Metallurgy and Technology, and approved by Qualified Person Richard Zaggle.
Why this matters comes down to the study we covered two weeks ago. When we put a number on Black Pine, the whole US$2.4 billion NPV rested on that modest 70.2% recovery — a low-grade deposit only works if the leach behaves as modeled. These tests confirm it does, at commercial particle size, which most projects gloss over. The kinetics are fast (90% of the gold out in about 36 days), and one Rangefront sample recovered 95% at a head grade of just 0.43 grams per tonne — potentially turning stripping waste into ore. That said, this validates prior work rather than adding new ounces. Our last entry flagged two open items: the Drilled-to-Measured drilling to upgrade the resource (expected late 2026) and the Idaho cyanidation permit filing (Q1 2027). Both remain pending — this release addressed neither. The stock has kept climbing regardless, up 37.9% over three months while the junior gold index rose 15.3% and gold itself sat flat at +0.1%.
Now the caveats, and they matter. Table 1 in the release lists extraction results for all seven samples but its numeric contents were not rendered in the text of the release as received; per-sample recovery and head-grade detail beyond the two highlighted results cannot be checked from the release text alone. One of seven permeability samples underperformed because of high clay content; the company says blending will manage it, but that depends on modeling spotting such material reliably. And that 95% Rangefront result is a single sample, called out as unusually high for its grade — it needs confirmation across more variability work in Phase 10. Watch for Phase 11 metallurgical results and the formal cyanidation permit application to Idaho DEQ, both slated for Q1 2027.