Perseus Mining’s production dips at Ghana mine

Dual-listed Perseus Mining has reported a slight decline in production during the first quarter of its 2014 financial year, owing to lower material movements and processing at its Edikan mine, in Ghana.

Gold production for the three months to September declined to 45 830 oz, which was 4% below the June quarter production of 47 565 oz.

Nearly 17% less ore was mined during the quarter under review and the head grade reduced by 13%. The lower first-quarter head grade was in line with expectations, Perseus said on Tuesday, adding that it reflected the strategy of processing a blend of ore drawn from stockpiles and the existing openpits.

The decreased head grade was partially offset by a 3% improvement in the gold recovery rate and improvements in the availability and use of the Edikan processing plant.

Cash costs for the quarter were 5% lower than in the June quarter, as Perseus’ cost-cutting measures took effect. The company said that it expected further efficiency gains and cost improvements in future reporting periods.

Cash cost for the quarter were $1 342/oz.

Meanwhile, during the quarter under review, Perseus sold 49 069 oz of gold, at an average price of A$1 342/oz, compared with the 52 626 oz sold during the previous quarter, at a sales price of A$1 308/oz.

Earlier this month, ASX- and TSX-listed Perseus announced an updated life-of-mine (LoM) plan for the Edikan mine, extending the project’s life by nearly one year, to 2024.

The new LoM plan estimated that average gold production of 230 000 oz would be reached, at an all-in cash cost of $937/oz from 2014 to 2024. The company’s production guidance for the financial year to the end of June 2014 remained unchanged at 200 000 oz.

Read more: September central bank gold changes around the world

In September, Turkey’s holdings of gold jumped for the third month in a row 2.9 tons to 490.3 tons while Kazakhstan added 2.52 tons taking its total holdings to 137 tons.

Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kuwait, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Philippines, Serbia, and Ukraine also boosted their gold reserves.

Russia moderately reduced its reserves for the first time in 12 months, dipping 0.37 mt to 1,015 mt, as did Mexico and Mozambique. Canada sold off 3 of its 3.1 tons.

Central-bank gold purchases were red hot last year, as countries added a combined 534.6 tons, the most since way back in 1964. 2013 purchasing has been cooler, and is predicted to finish up at roughly 350 tons total. 

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Indian firms to renegotiate $10.8bn Afghanistan iron ore deal

A consortium of Indian companies led by Steel Authority of India is seeking to renegotiate the terms of an iron ore deal in Afghanistan worth up to $10.8 billion, a senior official at the Ministry of Mines said on Tuesday.

Investment in Afghanistan's mining sector is considered one of the greatest hopes of the country attaining economic independence and the halt will add to concern that it will not be able to support itself economically as aid flows shrink.

"The negotiations are suspended for some reason ... (but) they haven't withdrawn from this process," the official told Reuters, asking for his name to be withheld because he is not authorised to speak to the media.

The Steel Authority of India and the two countries' mine ministries were not immediately available for comment.

The Afghan official did not give a reason for the suspension, but the investment, at the Hajigak mine, is in the once peaceful province of Bamiyan where increasing insurgent attacks mean it is now only safely reachable by air.

About two months ago, Chinese firms demanded a review of the country's landmark deal to produce copper in Afghanistan, agreed in 2007. According to the ministry official, the suspension of talks with the Indian firms was partly owed to a Chinese refusal to build a railway as initially planned.

The 900-km railway under consideration was to run from northern Pakistan, through Kabul, and then across the country up to Uzbekistan in the north.

"The Chinese were going to build the railway for the Aynak mine, and now the Chinese company don't want to build this railway, so the question is (how to find) another, alternative way to export iron," the official said.

He added that other issues in the contract that had come up for review included a plan to built a steel plant.

"Maybe within a month or two months we will restart the negotiations," he said.

The Hajigak deposit contains an estimated 1.8 billion tonnes of ore, with an iron concentration of 62 percent, according to the ministry, basing its figures on a survey carried out in the 1960s.

It is located in mountainous Bamiyan, where Afghanistan's world famous ancient Buddha statues once stood in the cliffs before being bombed to rubble by the Taliban.

It was once considered Afghanistan's most peaceful province due to the dominant local Hazara tribe's opposition to the Taliban, who are mostly ethnic Pashtuns and who massacred thousands of Hazara during their austere rule.

But now that foreign combat troops are withdrawing, with plans to exit by the end of 2014, violence is returning to the province and insurgent attacks on its roads mean that it is reachable only by air.

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KWG files patent application for new gas chromite reduction method

Prospective Northern Ontario chromite miner KWG Resources on Friday announced that it had filed a patent application for a new natural gas chromite reduction method.

The Toronto-based firm, with plans to mine chromite ore at its Black Horse deposit, within the still-unlocked Ring of Fire minerals-rich area, made the patent application ahead of discussions to commercialise the new technique of refining the ore into ferrochrome by means of natural gas.

"It would appear that this process, combining North America's newly discovered high-grade chromite with its also newly discovered wealth of natural gas, could usher a new paradigm into the stainless steelmaking world. This process could in any event enable further processing of the Ring of Fire chromite to occur in Ontario, without special exemptions to its domestic electricity price,” KWG president Frank Smeenk said.

KWG said the development of huge deposits of natural shale gas in the US and in Canada had led to a fall in the long-term cost of natural gas and the prospect of stable pricing for many years to come.

The company pointed out that there were currently no commercially viable chromite deposits in the US and all ferrochrome used in producing steel is imported, typically from South Africa and Kazakhstan. However, significant deposits of such ores were recently discovered in Canada, which is a low-cost natural gas producer, and because of this combination, the invention could be ideally exploited in the Ring of Fire.

The invention uses a modification of the basic and well-established technology used to produce directly reduced iron, to produce a chromium/iron alloy by using natural gas to reduce the oxides of both chromium and iron contained within the chromite ore, the morphology of which had been shown in testing to facilitate the progress of the reduction reactions.

KWG said laboratory work had demonstrated the validity of the process.

Chromite samples from a deposit within the Ring of Fire were successfully reduced to a highly metallised chromium/iron alloy suitable for steelmaking. The temperature required for reducing chromium was much higher than that for reducing iron alone.

The use of an accelerator enabled the reduction process to proceed at an acceptable rate at lower temperatures.

The chromite ore concentrate was supplied as fines and needed agglomeration before the reduction stage. This was accomplished by using a disc pelletiser, commonly available for producing iron-ore pellets. It had also been shown that carbon is a required additive to the chromite to facilitate reduction.

KWG said the process had been shown to produce metallisation levels of chromium and iron of 80% or more. Higher metallisation rates for both chromium and iron could be expected with more process development.

The resulting reduced chromite pellets were suitable for stainless and alloy steelmaking, either as batch or continuously charged components of the steelmaking charge.

Substantial cost advantages were expected when compared with the use of conventionally produced ferrochrome alloys. The carbon content of the reduced chromite could be considerably lower than the ferroalloys produced in a submerged electric arc furnace (SAF).

This would result in significant process advantages for the steelmaker and therefore lower its cost of production. The reduced chromite pellets can form part of the charge of a conventional SAF furnace producing ferrochrome, with significant cost benefits.

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Golden Bridge Mining Corporation Announces Acquisition Of Athabasca Basin Uranium Property

Golden Bridge Mining Corporation ("Golden Bridge" or "the Company") (TSX-V: GBM) is pleased to announce the Company has acquired by staking a total of 3,656.82 hectares (9,036.20 acres) of claims prospective for uranium mineralization in the prolificAthabasca Basin, located in Saskatchewan, Canada. This property is located in the vicinity of the recent discovery near Patterson Lake in Northern Saskatchewan by Alpha Minerals Inc. and Fission Energy Corp.

The Athabasca Basin regional magnetic data (Source: Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) Open Files 6817, Release date 15 June 2011) shows a similar signature of the Golden Bridge property to that of the Alpha Minerals Inc. recent discovery property, Patterson Lake South. The 3D geological model of Athabasca uranium generated by the Saskatchewan Ministry of the Economy "3-D File 2012-1" shows that the Golden Bridge property is located in a favourable geological structure zone.

In Canada, the Athabasca Basin is a region in the Canadian Shield and is located across the northern Saskatchewan and Alberta border. It is best known as the world's leading source of high grade uranium and currently supplies approximately 15% of the world's uranium consumption (World Nuclear Association). The basin is west of Wollaston Lake and south of Lake Athabasca, and covers about 100,000 sq. km mostly in Saskatchewan with a small portion in Alberta.  The basin is mainly sandstone from 100 to 1,000 metres in depth and uranium is found mostly at the base of the sandstone where it reaches the basement (Source: investcom.com-uranium-Athabasca).

The first uranium mine in this region was the Rabbit Lake Mine, which is the longest operating uranium production facility and the second largest uranium milling facility in the western world. Another significant discovery of uranium took place in Key Lake in 1975, which produced over 95,000 tonnes of U3O8. Since 1968, over 700,000 tonnes of U308 have been produced in this region.

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