Company Announcement - South Africa based global engineering and project delivery group DRA, together with its client, Aureus Mining Inc., has recently achieved the significant milestone of the first gold pour at the New Liberty project located in north western portion of the Republic of Liberia. DRA has been involved at the New Liberty gold project since its inception in May 2011, and has completed the assignment on an engineering, procurement, and construction management contract basis. DRA completed the Pre-feasibility Study, the Definitive Feasibility Study, and the Front End Engineering Design, prior to the start of the construction phase.
New Liberty is located within the Bea-MDA property, in Grand Cape Mount County in the north-western portion of the Republic of Liberia, approximately 100km north-west of the capital, Monrovia. The project comprised the development of a gold processing facility capable of treating a nominal tonnage of 90 000 tonnes per month throughput of ore. Processing consists of a two stage crushing circuit and a primary mill with regrinding using VERTIMILL® technology. Gold is leached in the carbon-in-leach circuit and gravity gold is leached with an intensive leach reactor.
Paul Thomson, CEO of the DRA Group comments: “I would like to personally congratulate Aureus Mining Inc., and the DRA team, and our construction partners involved, on achieving first gold pour on schedule at the New Liberty project, which is the first commercial gold project in Liberia”.
Thomson continues: “This was yet another project where DRA was responsible for various service offerings from total mine infrastructure development, processing plant to the diversion of the Marvoe Creek away from the open cast pit, and the tailings storage facility. Despite some of the extreme challenges of implementing a project in Liberia at the peak of the global Ebola crisis, DRA with its fellow contractors and the project owners have managed to mitigate these risks, and is on target to handover the plant to Aureus Mining for full production on schedule.
David Reading, CEO and President of Aureus Mining Inc. commented ”I would like to thank our partners DRA Mineral Projects for their exceptional commitment and endurance in helping Aureus achieve the significant milestone of first gold pour at the New Liberty Project in spite of the Ebola epidemic. Thanks to the dedication of the DRA team, we completed the build in 18 months and now have a high quality and well-engineered processing plant that is ready to move into full production”