Modern Mining Marchh 2017

GOLD

schedule calls for approximately a million bank cubic metres to be mined monthly. The mining will be a conventional drill-and- blast, load-and-haul operation with the deep oxide and transitional zones making for an easy start-up. The first pits to be mined will be Komana East and Komana West but ultimately three further pits will be brought into the mix – Guirin West and Sanioumale West and East. The Komana East pit has the biggest reserve – 230 koz at a grade of 3,06 g/t. Recovery of gold will be through a com- bination of gravimetric means and direct cyanidation. Gravity concentrate is treated through an intensive cyanidation process with the pregnant solution pumped to an indepen- dent gravity electrowinning circuit. The CIL circuit consists of seven tanks in series: one pre-leach tank and six CIL tanks. The plant is expected to deliver a gold recovery of 92,5 %. A two-stage crushing circuit is being installed to treat all ore types. In order to main- tain mill throughput, a tertiary crushing facility will be added when the proportion of hard fresh ore increases. A 12-hour live stockpile will ensure continuous and consistent feed to the mill. Among the companies supplying equipment for the plant are Metso (crushing circuit equip- ment), Outotec (ball mill), Afromix (agitators) and Kemix (screens and carbon regeneration kiln). To supply power, the mine will need a 6,5 MW capacity diesel genset facility. It is anticipated that this will be provided by an Independent Power Provider (IPP) and Hummingbird is currently negotiating with potential partners. With mine operations not too distant now, Hummingbird has started appointing the permanent staff who will run the mine and in February this year announced that Kevin Moxham had been employed as General Manager. He is hugely experienced in min- ing – in particular gold mining – and was

economics of Yanfolila have clearly appealed to the market and last year we were able to raise US$71 million in equity and US$45 mil- lion in debt to fully fund the project through to production. This allowed us to embark on full-scale construction – as opposed to earlier preparatory earthworks – in October 2016, when the first concrete was poured. Our equity raising, incidentally, was the biggest by an AIM-listed gold company in the past four years.” A key step in the development of Yanfolila was the appointment in July last year of South African project house SENET – involved in the project since the Gold Fields days – as the EPCM contractor to build the plant and asso- ciated infrastructure. SENET, of course, boasts considerable West African experience, hav- ing worked – amongst others – on Randgold’s Loulo and Tongon projects in Mali and Côte d’Ivoire respectively, as well as (more recently) the Karma gold project in Burkina Faso of True Gold (now part of Endeavour Mining). Hummingbird followed up in September with the appointment of IMAGRI-SARL – a Malian contractor – as the civil works contrac- tor (it is now responsible for the SMPP works as well) and in December announced that African Mining Services (AMS), a subsidiary of ASX- listed Ausdrill, had been selected as the mining contractor. AMS is highly experienced in West African gold mining with a track record in the region going back 25 years. Its contract is for an ini- tial three-year period and has a total value of US$112 million. The company will be deploy- ing a new mining fleet of mainly Caterpillar equipment worth US$38 million and will employ in the region of 450 people (mostly Malians) once it begins operations. Mining is due to commence in September this year, with the ore initially being stockpiled in advance of plant commissioning. At peak production dur- ing the first three years of mine life, the mining

View of the Yanfolila site (prior to erection of the tower crane) showing work on the CIL tank foundations.

At peak production during the first three years of mine life, the mining schedule calls for approximately a million bank cubic metres to be mined monthly.

22  MODERN MINING  March 2017