Bellevue Gold paste plant: engineered backfill implications for mine planners
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Bellevue Gold has approved construction of a paste backfill plant to service the Deacon and Deacon North underground mining areas at its namesake project in Western Australia, aiming to increase ore recovery from pillars and narrow stopes. The plant will use tailings-based paste to fill voids, improving ground support and allowing tighter stope spacing and higher extraction ratios compared with cemented rockfill. For geotechnical and mine planners, the move signals a shift towards engineered backfill to control dilution, manage seismicity and extend mine life in deep, high-grade zones.
Technical Brief
- Paste plant will be located on surface adjacent to existing Bellevue process plant footprint.
- Design will utilise tailings from the current processing circuit, avoiding separate dedicated backfill milling.
- Plant approval follows recent ramp-up of underground production at Deacon and Deacon North.
- Backfill strategy is integrated into the updated Bellevue mine plan and long-term scheduling.
- Capital for the paste plant has been approved within Bellevue’s existing project funding envelope.
- Adoption of tailings paste aligns with sector move away from surface tailings storage-only strategies.
Our Take
Bellevue Gold Limited’s work at Deacon and Deacon North slots into the ‘Projects’ and ‘Sustainability’ cluster that makes up a sizeable portion of the 1989 tag-matched pieces, signalling that Australian underground operators are increasingly framing backfill and tailings decisions as ESG as well as productivity levers.
Within our 1052 Mining stories, Australian items often highlight paste plants as a way to both stabilise underground stopes and reduce surface tailings footprints, so any recovery uplift at Deacon and Deacon North is likely to be evaluated alongside reduced closure liabilities and permitting risk.
For Western Australian goldfields operations like Deacon and Deacon North, paste backfill typically enables tighter stope spacing and higher extraction ratios in remnant or narrow-vein areas, which can extend mine life and defer capital for new ore sources even when no headline resource upgrade is announced.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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