Rox’s Youanmi gold project: underground design and legacy workings lens for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Rox Resources is accelerating development of its 100 per cent-owned Youanmi gold project in Western Australia, advancing underground mine planning, drilling and early works towards first gold production. The brownfields operation, centred on historic high-grade lodes, is being progressed in parallel on multiple fronts, including resource definition drilling and underground access preparation. For geotechnical and mining teams, the key focus will be integrating new underground designs with legacy workings and optimising ground support and sequencing in a previously mined, structurally complex goldfield.
Technical Brief
- Underground access preparation reportedly includes re‑establishing safe egress routes and emergency escapeways in legacy drives.
- Rox is progressing ventilation planning for the recommissioned workings, a key control for heat and diesel particulates.
- Refurbishment of old headings is expected to require systematic ground support upgrades to current Western Australian standards.
- Integration of new development with historic stopes will demand rigorous void detection and probe drilling to avoid breakthroughs.
- Early works likely encompass power, communications and refuge chamber infrastructure to meet contemporary underground safety expectations.
- Sequencing around remnant pillars and old stopes will be critical to control stress redistribution and rockburst potential.
- Brownfields setting implies detailed re‑survey and re‑logging of historic plans to verify actual excavation locations and conditions.
- For similar Australian brownfields gold mines, the project underlines the need to reconcile legacy layouts with modern ground control and emergency response requirements.
Our Take
Within the 353 gold‑tagged pieces in our database, Western Australia projects like Youanmi feature heavily, signalling that WA remains the core jurisdiction for near‑term gold supply growth compared with emerging Australian states and territories.
Among the 2066 Projects/Safety‑tagged items, WA gold developments frequently face scrutiny around fatigue management and remote‑area logistics, so Rox Resources’ path to first gold at Youanmi will likely hinge as much on workforce and camp design as on plant and pit sequencing.
Rox Resources is a relatively small name in our 1090‑story Mining corpus, which suggests that successfully bringing the Youanmi gold project into production could shift it from an exploration‑weighted profile towards the cohort of WA mid‑tier producers that attract more consistent coverage and market attention.
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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