SGS is pleased to announce the expansion of our commercial geochemistry laboratory in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The Ouagadougou facility is strategically located to service the growing regional demand for geochemical testing needs from the West African gold exploration and mining industry. With the addition of over 29,000 ft2 (over 2,700 m2) of laboratory space and major expansions of the existing fire assay, BLEG and wet laboratory facilities, the laboratory will provide services for gold, including:
• Fire assay
• Flame atomic absorption
• Gravimetric measurement
• Cyanide extractible BLEG
This expansion will ensure better turnaround for local clients. The new laboratory will be fully operational and ready to accept samples in February 2013, with a grand opening to be held in early April 2013. The SGS facility in Ouagadougou provides high volume sample preparation gold analysis and feeds analytical work for elements other than gold into SGS’ full service laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa. The facility will provide analytical capacity of >130,000 samples per month, with capacity to process prepared samples from any of the ten mobile (MSPU) and fixed sample preparation units in the region. The Ouagadougou laboratory is a commercial facility that complements our unmatched on-site laboratory network in Africa (Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Tanzania).
This expansion further enhances SGS’ unparalleled global network of over 150 commercial, on-site and mobile laboratories, 12 metallurgical facilities and 5 mineralogy facilities. Of these sites, 5 labs are fully integrated GEMM (geochemistry, environmental, metallurgy, mineralogy) labs (located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile and South Africa) and 3 provide integrated geochemistry-metallurgy services (Mexico, Peru and Russia). Around the world, SGS offers a wide range of services to the minerals sector including geochemical analysis, resource calculation, mineralogy, metallurgy, advanced systems, water treatment and trade services. For further information regarding these and other SGS services, please visit www.sgs.com/mining.