Modern Mining July 2015

GOLD

Namoya continues ramp-up to commercial production

Reporting on its activities in the second quarter, Canada’s Banro Corporation says that its new Namoya gold mine in the DRC continued to ramp up toward commercial production levels, achieving stacking levels greater than 140 000 tonnes of agglomerated ore in June.

was to acquire an agglomeration drum to run the mine as an agglomerated heap leach operation while pursuing options to best utilise the CIL plant to process the fines material. An agglom- eration drumwas procured in the fourth quarter of 2014 and installed in January this year. In its quarterly report, Banro says that – as previously reported – a delay in financing resulted in a need to modify the mine plan to allow for the pre-stripping of the Kakula reserve pit. This modification impacted ore availabil- ity early in the second quarter as the mine fleet focused on waste removal in order to allow for increased access to mining faces when the first additions to the mobile fleet were commissioned in late May. This contributed to a decrease in the stacking level in April to 57 211 tonnes, which subsequently increased to 130 974 tonnes in May and 142 082 tonnes in June. The significant decrease in stacking levels fromMarch’s 103 163 tonnes to the much lower April figure was also driven by the adverse impact of unseasonably high rains which inter- rupted supply routes and the ability to deliver procured materials and supplies. The availability of ore from mining activi- ties and the available medium grade stockpile material resulted in the stacking of ore with an average grade of 1,52 g/t Au. According to Banro, Namoya management is

D esigned as a hybrid gravity/ CIL and heap leach operation, the Namoya mine poured its first gold in Q4 2014. The prop- erty lies at the southern end of the Twangiza-Namoya gold belt in Maniema Province, 225 km south-west of Bukavu, and consists of one PE (Exploitation Permit) cover- ing an area of 174 km 2 . Alluvial gold was first discovered in the area in 1930 and was mined between 1931 and 1947. Primary gold was also discovered during this period and under- ground mining on the Filon ‘B’ deposit began in 1947. Formal mining ceased in the 1960s, only recommencing with Banro’s development of the present mine. During wet commissioning of the process plant last year, it became apparent that the effi- ciency of the CIL circuit was being hampered by the quantity of fines content in the ore, as it exceeded the design capacity. The company determined that the best solution to the problem

The processing plant at the Namoya site.

22  MODERN MINING  July 2015