Gold ore miner Pan African Resources has completed construction of a regrind mill at its Barberton Mines Tailings Retreatment Plant (BTRP) in South Africa to help the facility achieve annualized gold production of 21,000 ounces in June.
Image: Pan African Resources’ Barberton Tailings Retreatment Plant. Photo: courtesy of Pan African Resources.
BTRP, which has been constructed with an investment of ZAR325.7m ($26.14m), is located at the Fairview Mine in Mpumalanga province in eastern South Africa.
Commissioning of its regrind mill will be completed this week, on schedule and on budget, said Pan African Resources.
The company said that the construction of the regrind mill has taken five months. The mill is expected to enable the BTRP to maintain the annual production of around 21,000 ounces per annum.
The UK-based Pan African Resources said that the 1.7MW, 4.3m by 4.9m, Veecor regrind mill regrind mill was installed to reduce the coarseness of the material treated from the Harper Dump. Further, the mill will help in improving material handling and recoveries in the future.
DRA Global handled the mill refurbishment and installation, with New Concept Projects as its main subcontractor.
Pan African Resources also updated on the R1.7bn ($130m) Elikhulu tailings retreatment project in Evander, Mpumalanga with construction ahead of schedule and expected to be completed in August. The company expects full commissioning of the project by the end of September 2018.
Pan African Resources is anticipating capacity of the Elikhulu project to be ramped up by 200,000 tonnes to 1.2-million tonnes per month from December 2018. This, it said will be by integrating the existing Evander Tailing Retreatment Plant (ETRP) throughput with the related economies of scale and improved recovery benefits.
Pan African Resources, in a statement, said: “The increase in processing capacity will not affect the original construction schedule or first gold production expectations.
“In conjunction with the ETRP throughput, these two surface operations, once in full production, are expected to produce more than 70,000 ounces per annum.”