Larvotto’s Hillgrove tailings plan: recovery and rehab insights for mine engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Larvotto Resources is progressing a tailings reprocessing and site rehabilitation strategy at the historic Hillgrove antimony–gold project in New South Wales, targeting metal recovery from legacy tailings rather than fresh underground ore. The plan centres on re-treating existing tailings storage facilities using modern processing to extract residual antimony and gold while reshaping and capping the deposits to contemporary geotechnical and environmental standards. For engineers, the project signals further demand for tailings characterisation, stability assessment and water management design on brownfield Australian sites.
Technical Brief
- Larvotto is assessing multiple legacy tailings storage facilities at Hillgrove for staged, modular retreatment.
- Work focuses on historic antimony–gold tailings produced by previous operators over several decades of mining.
- The company is targeting a low-capex flowsheet by leveraging existing Hillgrove site infrastructure and services.
- Existing plant foundations, power supply and site access are expected to reduce new civil construction requirements.
- Rehabilitation planning is being integrated with processing design to minimise double-handling and rework of tailings.
- Hillgrove’s long mining history implies highly variable tailings domains, requiring detailed geochemical and geotechnical characterisation.
- Larvotto positions Hillgrove as a potential near-term producer, indicating an accelerated approvals and design timetable.
- Project outcomes will add a further Australian case study for integrated tailings retreatment and closure on brownfield sites.
Our Take
Earlier coverage of Hillgrove shows tailings testwork delivering up to 95% antimony and 75% gold recovery, so any ‘dual recovery and rehabilitation’ angle here likely hinges on monetising those tailings while reducing the legacy storage footprint in New South Wales.
With Hillgrove framed in prior pieces as an antimony–gold critical minerals build, Larvotto Resources’ rehabilitation narrative positions the project to tap into Australian and federal critical minerals support schemes that increasingly reward ESG-positive reprocessing of historic sites.
Record tungsten prices noted in recent Hillgrove coverage suggest that if rehabilitation works can also access tungsten-bearing material, Larvotto could justify more aggressive clean-up and rehandling than would be viable on environmental grounds alone.
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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