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For a Bird’s Eye View of Cluff Gold’s Kalsaka Project in Burkina Faso, Stand on the Ridge Next to the Man With the Ak-47
Author: tristass
For A Bird’s Eye View Of Cluff Gold’s Kalsaka Project In Burkina Faso, Stand On The Ridge Next To The Man With The AK-47
The vultures circling above the mine camp at Algy Cluff’s Kalsaka gold project in Burkina Faso have seen better days. Not only are they unpopular with the locals, to say the least, but there’s also a distinct lack of carnage on the ground for them to feed off. Kalsaka is a few hundred kilometers north west of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, and by rights the presence of so many foreigners and locals at this arid spot ought, after so long, to be providing rich pickings in the traditional manner for vultures. Not so. They get some meager bits of rubbish to pick over, but the kitchen workers at Kalsaka are fairly stingy about what they let get past them. Burkina Faso is, after all, according to BBC research, the third poorest country in the world.
The vultures’ best hope might be for a piece of any roadkill generated as Cluff’s Gold’s haphazard fleet of pickup trucks trundle back and forth between the camp and the mine, five minutes drive north over the brow of a low hill. But the day after the Kalsaka mine was formally opened in a fairly easy-going ceremony by Burkina Faso’s prime minister Tertius Zongo, Minesite trudged along that very track, and there was no roadkill anywhere in evidence. There’s not much around to kill, of course, although the occasional squirrel does scamper across the project’s central processing area, from the access road to behind the large barn where the cyanide sacks are piled up like sandbags. There are small birds too – martins – swarming on the power lines that run up by the medical centre, and swooping down to dip into the ponds behind the gold room and the carbon plant.
But martins are too agile to be caught by any of the Cluff Gold pickup trucks. The squirrels are pretty light on their feet too. And the rains have just come and gone, so the country’s wildlife is in general feeling pretty refreshed. All except the vultures, who have nothing to pick over except a discarded snakeskin, which lies just below the brow of a promontory beyond the office. It was there that the day before a man with an AK-47 sticking outwards and upwards from his hip had been standing silhouetted against the sky. It’s a good spot for surveying Cluff’s entire operations, and this military type spent most of his day quietly watching for any (albeit unlikely) signs that a threat to prime minister Tertius Zongo – sitting a few hundred yards behind him under a corrugated iron canopy – might materialize from somewhere amongst Cluff’s mining and processing operations.
From that vantage point you can see almost everything, and for the mining literate, the whole project seems to run in an arc from right to left. To the extreme right, above and behind the area that they cordoned off for locals to watch during the prime minister’s visit, is an area where waste rock is trucked. Come back along a haul road that runs along a ridge on the near horizon, down a little, and you get to the main Kalsaka pit, which, at the time of the prime minister’s visit, was being carefully delineated by bits of pink and yellow tape for the purposes of ore control. At the back of the pit, those with an eye for a rock type – though Minesite must confess to being a bit of a Mister Magoo in this department – can see for themselves the outline of part of the kaolinitic quartz vein that hosts most of the 790,000 JORC ounces that Cluff is mining into to produce Kalsaka’s projected 60,000 ounces per year. The previous day, down in the pit, project geologist Ed Lamb had pointed out various other geological features of interest, but most of these were lost on Minesite, who also, for shame, briefly got muddled as to the difference between ore control and grade control. What can we say? – the sun was getting hot by that time.
But to pull back to the perspective of the man on the promontory with the AK-47: straight ahead and below is the heart of the processing operation – the storage sheds where the squirrels scamper, and then behind them, reaching down from the haul road that bends round from the pit, the primary crusher, which occasionally spits out larger rocks onto a heap below, but in general tends to feed crushed ore onto a conveyor which runs from right to left. This ore passes under a silo, from out of which drops cement powder. The combination of ore and cement then passes into a large drum where it’s spun and mixed together, and then travels several hundred yards further round to the left to the top of the heaps, where in the morning light, the haze of the spray at the top can just be seen. And further back, behind and to the left of the heaps, the carbon plant and the gold room poke up like a medieval tower in the distance.
The gold room was where all the action was the day Minesite took that walk along the road between the camp and the mine, watching the vultures and noting the absence of roadkill. It’s not good to have journalists wandering around unaccompanied on your mine property, and it wasn’t long before Minesite was picked up by a friendly driver, and taken safely to the office. There, an encounter with project engineer Tony Smith lead to an invitation to view Cluff Gold’s impending gold pour, and view it we did – the molten yellow slag pouring out of the furnace first, followed by the gold itself, one nicely shaped 25 kilogramme bar, showing all the dull lustre you’d expect after the black crust had been chipped off and the bar washed down. The bar was then carried across the room to be weighed, before being placed in a nice sturdy safe under the watchful eye of Cluff’s new security chief, a former British army major, ex hussars, named Simon.
That gold bar presents one part of around 100,000 reasons per year why those other vultures that have been circling Cluff – the ones in the City of London – suddenly eased up towards the end of the week. Combined with Algy’s Cote D’Ivoire mine, production from Kalsaka means that Cluff Gold is on the way to becoming 100,000 ounce producer this year. In the hot and close gold room, as Tony Smith supervised one Malaysian and two Burkinese staff in the maneuvering of molten metal and slag, with heat-proof gloves and visors, here was further hard evidence that Cluff Gold is moving firmly into the ranks of Aim’s producing miners. And so, as some heavy PR efforts continued on the home front, the City’s vultures stopped peering down at the company quite so greedily, and the shares rose over 20 per cent. It would be nice to call this the “Tertius Zongo†effect, but a more proper epithet is probably “production re-ratingâ€. It’s a shame for Algy and his hard-working team on the ground out there that the global economic situation has meant that the shares re-rated from such a low base. On the other hand the production means that Cluff ought to see out the current economic turmoil without too many headaches, and everyone’s fairly glad about that. Except the vultures.
About the Author:
http://www.cnmining.org/news/?id=252
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – For a Bird’s Eye View of Cluff Gold’s Kalsaka Project in Burkina Faso, Stand on the Ridge Next to the Man With the Ak-47
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