Progress at the Kilimapesa mine, in Kenya, is on track since the relining of the mill in January and the restart of production, London-listed Caracal Gold CEO Robbie McCrae has said.

“We look forward to presenting the March numbers at the end of the month,” he said in a March 7 report on the restart of production at the milling/carbon-in-leach (CIL) plant at Kilimapesa, which took place at the beginning of February.

Caracal reported that opencast mining continued in pit 3B with a total of 11 400 t mined at an average grade of 1.82 g/t gold with a strip ratio of ore to waste of 2.7 to 1.

The CIL plant was recommissioned after the mill relining in January. Since then, feed into the CIL circuit was 7 350 t for February at an average feed grade of 1.71 g/t. 

Overall, the gold recovered totalled 9 077 g, although with a large portion of gold remaining in the process to build required process inventory.

McCrae said various recommissioning challenges had been faced and solved, including power outages from the grid supply and stress testing of the feed rate, which resulted in misplaced grits reporting into the CIL circuit.

However, prescreening of the coarse ore fraction out of the feed improved the grade to the milling/CIL plant, with the oversize material used as feed to the heap leach plant, thereby progressively improving ongoing flow sheet optimisation.

AUDIT

“The financial team in the UK and Kenya have been working diligently with our auditors since November and progress on the audit is in the final stage,” McCrae said.

Auditing firm PKF Littlejohn and PKF East Africa have been engaged to complete the group audit for the year ended June 30, 2023. Caracal has a dedicated team in the UK and Kenya working to complete the audit, which is in its final phase.

Caracal said it would publish the audited results as soon as they were available, together with the unaudited interim results for the six-month period ended December 31, 2023.

Following the publication of the results, the company will aim to finalise the prospectus with the Financial Conduct Authority as soon as possible.

MANAGEMENT

Caracal also announced that Stephanus de Kock has joined the team as Kilimapesa mine GM. He is an experienced mining professional with more than 22 years' experience in project development and operations in Africa.

The company’s finance team in Kenya has also appointed Stella Nguchu, who is a chartered accountant with more than ten years of experience. Most recently she served as Tatu City financial manager.