Barrick’s said its Unlock the Value program invites scientists, engineers and other inventors to solve a scientific conundrum. Geologists have determined there are 180 million oz of silver contained in gold reserves in the ore at the Veladero mine. Because the silver particles are encapsulated in silica, current processing methods are recovering only 6.7% of the silver. The program invites proposals for an economically viable way to significantly increase silver recovery from this type of ore.

For proposals judged to have merit, Barrick will fund research and development. For a technology that is successfully implemented at Veladero, the company will pay a performance bonus of $10 million.

Interested researchers can register and submit proposals through a special Web site at www.unlockthevalue.com. Preliminary proposals must be submitted by January 21, 2008, to be considered for the next stage of proposal development. Proposals will be assessed by a team of experts and evaluated on their technical viability and ability to be safely implemented at Veladero. Those judged to have merit will be invited to submit a detailed proposal. If successful, they will go on to further phases of development, testing and commercial evaluation.

The Veladero mine is located in San Juan Province, about 320 km northwest of San Juan in the Frontera District. It is located at elevations between 4,000– 4,850 m above sea level, and comprises two open pits: Filo Federico to the north and Amable to the south. Barrick invested about $540 million to construct the mine, which opened in October, 2005.

In 2006, its first full year of production, Veladero produced 511,000 oz of gold. It is a conventional open-pit operation that uses 36m3-class hydraulic shovels, 240-mtcapacity haul trucks, and 45,000–90,000 lb-class drills. Ore is crushed to 32 mm by a two-stage crushing process, and then transported via trucks to the leach pad area. Run-of-mine ore is trucked directly to the valley-fill leach pad. Recovered gold is smelted into doré on-site and shipped to an outside refinery for processing into bullion.