Inspection, verification and testing company SGS reports that it has been awarded the operational contract for the on-site laboratory for Endeavour Mining’s Agbaou gold project, in Côte d’Ivoire.

SGS will design, equip and operate the laboratory to provide sample preparation and analysis in support of mining and processing for the Endeavour Mining-owned greenfield project, situated about 200 km north-west of the country’s former capital, Abidjan.

The five-year operational contract was awarded to SGS in the first quarter of this year.
Operational commissioning of the on-site laboratory is expected to start during the third quarter.

The new laboratory has been designed to service the Agbaou mine by providing critical data to guide site activities. It is scheduled to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week and its scope of operations will include sample preparation and determination of gold using aqua regia, which is the acidic mixture used in dissolving gold.

SGS also currently runs an on-site labor-atory in Tongon, which is in the north of Côte d’Ivoire, around 55 km south of the Mali border, as well as a sample preparatory labor- atory in the official political and adminis-trative capital city of Yamoussoukro.

“SGS is well recognised in the laboratory-testing sector and this new facility reflects a commitment to ensuring that all services are accessible to all its clients,” the company states, adding that it operates on-site and near-site laboratories in some of the most remote locations in the world, regardless of the temperature, the altitude or how high volume the programme is.

The Agbaou facility complements SGS’s unmatched laboratory network in Africa and globally. SGS operates over 150 commercial, on-site and mobile sample preparation unit geochemical laboratories, 12 metallurgical facilities, five mineralogy facilities, over 120 energy mineral labs, 33 fertiliser labs and 80 trade offices.

Of these sites, five labs are located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile and South Africa and provide fully integrated geo-chemistry, environmental, metallurgy and mineralogy services and three provide inte-grated geochemistry-metallurgy services in Liberia, Peru and Russia.

Many of SGS’s geochemistry laboratories comply with the ISO/IEC 17025 standard for specific registered tests.
SGS employs more than 75 000 people, and operates a network of over 1 500 offices and laboratories around the world. SGS offers a range of services that cover exploration, pro- duction, industrial applications and decom-missioning and closure.