El Zorro Project

El Zorro Project is located in the municipality of Caldera, Atacama Region, Chile, approximately 37 km northeast of the city of Caldera and 15 km from the Pacific Ocean. It is an open-pit gold mining project promoted by Tesoro Gold, which includes the development of associated mining infrastructure such as a process plant, crushing system, tailings storage facility (TSF), waste rock dump (WRD), and auxiliary facilities. The project has an estimated mine life of 16 years and is expected to generate approximately 41 million tonnes of tailings.

Within this framework, a Geotechnical Investigation and Soil Characterization Study was carried out to support the design of the project’s main infrastructure, including the following activities:

• Subsurface geotechnical characterization: execution and interpretation of geotechnical boreholes, test pits, and exploration campaigns to determine the physical and mechanical properties of foundation materials.
• Geophysical investigations: implementation of ReMi, MASW, seismic refraction (Vp), and Nakamura (HVSR) surveys to characterize the dynamic behavior of the subsurface and define seismic wave velocity profiles.
• Geotechnical laboratory testing: grain size distribution, Atterberg limits, moisture content, particle density, shear strength, unconfined compressive strength (UCS) testing on rock, and chemical analyses to obtain design parameters.
• Bearing capacity assessment: determination of geotechnical parameters and bearing capacity for the process plant, tailings storage facility (TSF), waste rock dump (WRD), and other project infrastructure.
• Technical supervision of the exploration campaign (Owner’s Technical Inspection – OTI): quality control of drilling, test pits, sampling, and geological-geotechnical logging, as well as in-situ density and permeability testing using the Porchet method.
• Geotechnical interpretation and design recommendations: integration of field, laboratory, and geophysical data to characterize foundation conditions and provide recommendations for the safe and efficient design of the mining infrastructure.