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Some of the civil works that have been completed at the Cam & Motor gold processing plant include carbon in leach tanks above

Walter Muchinguri Assistant Business Editor
The construction of RioZim’s $20 million Cam and Motor Mine gold processing plant, which will triple production, is on course with at least 55 percent of the work now complete.

A tour of the site showed that most of the civil works, construction of a crushing section and conveyor infrastructure, water tanks, carbon in leach tanks and thickener is almost complete.

The firm’s CEO, Mr Noah Matimba said he was confident that they will meet the anticipated time of commissioning with the last shipment of material for the plant from China expected at the mine within the next few days.

“As you can see most of the civic works are done although we are still to install things like the conveyor belts and motors but we are hopeful that the plant will be ready for commissioning by September.

“Part of the last shipment is coming via Beira while the other shipment comprising of ball mills that came through the port of Durban is already in the country en-route to the mine,” he said.

He added that they had also ordered and signed a contract for a floatation plant, which is expected to be delivered during Q4 2016.

Mr Matimba said upon commissioning they expected the milled capacity at the mine to treble from 24 000 tonnes per month to 75 000 tonnes per month.

The company is currently using a rented processing plant in Chakari, which is approximately 50 km away from Kadoma.

Mr Matimba said while they were expecting increased tonnage, this would not translate to trebling in gold production.

“While we expected tonnage to increase this will, however, not translate to a trebling in gold production because at the moment our mining operations are restricted to one corner of the pit which has high quality ore but we expect that as we continue to mine we will have a mix of high and low grade ore therefore effectively reducing the milled head grade.

“We therefore expect gold production to increase from the current 70 to 75 kg to about 120kg to 130 kg per month.

“This together with the 70 kg from Renco will put us in the 200 kg league, which puts RioZim among the major gold producers such as Freda Rebecca and Metallon Gold,” he said.

The new plan will require at least 300 employees.

“Initially most of the employees will come from our Empress Nickel Refinery, which is currently under care and maintenance due to unavailability of matte from the major supplier Bamangwato Concessions Ltd (BCL) of Botswana.

On the financial side Mr Matimba said that they expected the increase in production following the completion of the new plant to see their operating profits from gold operations almost doubling to what was achieved in 2015, at the back of a stable gold price.

Mr Matimba said their vision, subject to availability of ore and agreement with the owners, was to continue to increase gold production by continuing to utilise the rented gold processing plant even after the commissioning of the new plant.

Further exploration is currently underway around Cam & Motor Mine as well as at Renco mine. This is intended to establish more knowledge on the gold reserves available.

“We believe that our open pit mine, which has a life span of 15 years, has the capacity to supply both plants and at the moment we are doing further explorations to sufficiently define our ore body.

“We are also doing explorations at Renco mine to determine whether we should sink a new shaft or expand capacity of the existing shaft further,” he said.

Apart from pursuing an increase in gold production, Mr Matimba said they were also actively looking for alternative suppliers of matte for the Empress Nickel Refinery.

To this end, he said they had engaged local potential suppliers of nickel and copper matte, both of whom have indicated a willingness to supply the raw material although they are still to attend to a few issues at their respective operations.

“We are, however, hopeful that BCL will resume supplies early in 2017 since they have indicated a willingness to continue to supply us with matte,” he said.

The restart of ENR will see Rio Zim’s entire workforce increasing from around 1900 people to about 2300.

RioZim, which has five operating divisions RioGold, Riobase Metals, Rioenergy, Riodiamonds and Riochrome has been riding on increased gold production from Cam & Motor.

The company reported a 42 percent growth in gold output in 2015 (vs 2014) at 1 200 kilogrammes (42,328 ounces) after it commissioned Cam & Motor, which resulted in revenue from gold increasing from $25,8 million in 2014 to $44,6 million in 2015.

This, together with other cost containment measures which saw total costs coming down 15 percent from $77 million in 2014 to $67 million in 2015, resulted in it narrowing its operating loss by 99 percent from $10,9 million in 2014 to $150 000 in 2015 while EBITDA improved 132 percent from a negative $8,5 million to a positive $2,7 million.