[miningmx.com] — Great Basin Gold, the international mining company developing a gold mine on the Witwatersrand, on Monday said the start up of its Burnstone metallurgical plant would be delayed by two weeks.
This is after South African power utility Eskom informed the company that the
Burnstone project would only be tied in to the national electricity grid on August 8.
“Although delayed, finalisation of the power supply from Eskom is a significant
step towards the commissioning of the Burnstone metallurgical plant,” said Great
Basin president and CEO Ferdi Dippenaar.
“Internal delays at Eskom impacted on its previous commitments to deliver power to site by the end of June 2010. Fortunately, the delay in commissioning the mill is only limited to two weeks, and is not expected to significantly impact on the planned ore throughput,” Dippenaar said.
Providing an update on the project, the company said the metallurgical plant
construction project has made rapid progress against an aggressive 15 month delivery time line.
Heavy civil construction has largely been completed, construction of various
buildings is far advanced, and the off-site assembled components are being delivered and installed.
The tailings facility project is also progressing well, with Phase 1 having been
completed and ready to receive tailings from the plant.
Another highlight in the past two months was completion of the sinking phase of the Burnstone vertical shaft to its final depth of 1 598 ft (487 m) in early May.
The company said good progress continues to be made in the development of
underground infrastructure at Burnstone with a significant milestone achieved
towards the end of June with the holing of the decline with the vertical shaft.
A total of 8 822 ft (2 692 m) of on-reef development was completed by the end of June 2010.
“The long hole stoping trials are progressing well and the rate of mining is expected to increase as more mining areas become available,” the company said.
It added that a total of about 126 000 tonnes have been accumulated on the ore stockpiles, which will be used for mill commissioning.
