[miningmx.com] — COAL of Africa’s first producing coking coal colliery in South Africa, the Vele mine in Limpopo, on Tuesday took delivery of the plant from the project engineering consultants, ELB Engineering Services (ELB), at an official handover ceremony.
Production at the Vele colliery resumed in December 2011 with the extraction of ROM material. The wet commissioning phase of the plant was completed in December 2011, following which a couple of adjustments were required owing to the protracted period that the plant was idle.
Since then, hot commissioning was completed in February 2012 and additional test work at the site is aimed at confirming the design of processing infrastructure to enable the recovery of additional coking coal from the slimes portion of the coal, as well as the production of a secondary product other than coking coal.
“After the permitting delays associated with this project, this colliery is now in the position of having the necessary authorisations to process the coal emanating from our mining operations, and, along with our shareholders, we look forward to our first coal sales in Q4 of this financial year,” said Riaan van der Merwe, COO of CoAL.
