The Cangrejos Project is underlain by a Miocene intrusion of dioritic to granodioritic composition. Several breccia zones and pipes occur within this intrusion and many have associated magnetic highs and gold +/- copper soil anomalies. The Cangrejos Zone is a northeasterly trending zone of porphyry-style mineralization which has been defined by widely spaced drill holes. It extends for approximately 1,000 m in a northeasterly direction, has widths ranging from 70 m to 600 m, and has been defined to a depth of at least 600 m. The zone is open to the north, south, west, and at depth.

Mineralization is associated with porphyritic quartz diorite intrusions and hydrothermal breccias. High metal values are due to finely disseminated chalcopyrite, pyrite, and minor bornite, molybdenite, and pyrrhotite. The host rocks exhibit patchy secondary biotite (potassic) and strong silica-chlorite (propylitic) alteration. Mineralization is associated with a late-stage, calcic-sodic alteration which is characterized by actinolite, chlorite, and albite.

At the westerly Gran Bestia mineralized zone, porphyry-style mineralization is associated with hydrothermal breccias of diorite and quartz diorite.

The Cangrejos deposit is a gold-copper, silica- saturated, alkalic porphyry-style deposit. This type of deposit is typically found along paleo- subduction margins (Carter, 1981; Cox et al., 1987).

The Cangrejos deposit is amenable to conventional, large- scale, open pit mining methods. Floating cone (FC) evaluations were conducted to determine potentially economic pit limits and the mining phase (pushback) development sequence. Four mining phases were designed and used to estimate contained inferred mineral resources, from which a mine production schedule was developed using a declining cutoff grade policy to maximize project present values.

The processing plant for the Cangrejos Project is a conventional copper-gold flotation concentrator. It has been designed to treat 40,000 tpd (14.6 Mtpa) of mineralized material during the first 5 years of operation and then be expanded to process 80,000 tpd (29.2 Mtpa) thereafter. The plant feed contains 0.59 gpt silver, 0.69 gpt gold, 0.12% copper, and 26 ppm molybdenum. The plant is designed to treat fresh and partially oxidized material to produce gravity gold concentrates, copper-gold flotation concentrates, and molybdenum flotation concentrates that will be trucked to Puerto Bolivar and shipped to smelters and refiners for further processing. Nearsurface saprolite and saprock materials are not included in the current processing plan as they respond poorly to the selected concentration processes.

The process flowsheets include the following unit processes:

- Primary crushing and overland conveyor

- Crushed mineralized material stockpile and reclaim

- SAG mill with discharge screening and pebble crushing

- Ball mill grinding with hydro-cyclone classification

- Gravity gold concentrators with cleaner concentrate filtering

- Bulk copper-molybdenum rougher flotation

- Bulk rougher concentrate regrinding

- 3-Stage bulk concentrate cleaners and cleaner scavenger flotation

- Thickening of bulk concentrate

- Copper-molybdenum separation flotation via roughers, scavengers, and 5 stages of cleaning

- Thickening and filtering of copper and molybdenum final concentrates in pressure filters

- Thickening and filtering of flotation tailings and recycling decant water

- Conveying and stacking the filtered tailings in a storage area.