Pickstone underground creates over 500 new jobs
Gold-focused miner, Dallaglio Holdings through its Pickstone Peerless Mine underground project has created 550 new jobs with a potential to create a similar number by developing its open pit mine to underground with feasibility studies currently underway.
Rudairo Mapuranga
The study is for a second underground operation on the Peerless orebody. This is the orebody that is lower grade but has a wider orebody.
Speaking on the sidelines of a Ministerial visit by the Deputy Minister of Mines and Mining Development Engineer Polite Kambamura, Pickstone Peerless Mine General Manager Engineer Alfred Madowe said the underground operation took an investment of US$22 million with a further US$27 million committed towards its expansion. This in total created 550 new jobs.
He said the mine was still running its open pit and intended to close early next year but one of the pits will continue to end of next year to support the underground operations as the mine ramps up underground production with an Outlook to go to an average 100 kgs a month.
The Mine according to Engineer Madowe will next year expand its CIL plant to help the mine process 42 000 tonnes a month.
“This operation is now employing about 550 people that are going underground, those are 550 new jobs that this operation has created. We are still running the open pit, we are closing one of the pits early next year but one of the pit is continuing hopefully to end of next year basically to support underground as we are ramping up underground production. We also want to rampup the tonnes we are processing, in terms of out look we would want to go to about 100 kgs a month. From June next we would have expanded our CIL plant, at the moment we have extended an additional mill so we now have 4 mills capable of doing 42 000 tonnes but we can’t do 42 000 because of the limitation on our tanks but after expanding on our tanks we can now go to 42000 tonnes per month,” Engineer Madowe said.
Eng Madowe said that work was in progress for the development of the open pit project to underground with conceptual studies already concluded showing a potential underground operation with a bigger ore body than the current underground operation but with slightly Lower grades.
He said the mine was now moving to feasibility study where a 40 metres decline is going to be established below the pit and then further drilling and exploration commencing to define size and type of the body.
“What we started by doing is a conceptual study, it took the exploration drilling that we did for the surface operation, it extended about 60 to 100 metres below the pit bottom. We used that information to estimate the shape and size of the ore body further down, the indication are that we a potential underground operation. Its a bigger ore body, slightly Lower grades than Pickstone but because of the volume it will be able to sustain underground operation. We are now moving to the feasibility study ,what we want to do is put a decline and then go about 40m below the pit and start drilling further down and do exploration. On the base of that exploration we can then define the size, and type of underground, it’s an underground we can actually mechanise,” Engineer Madowe said.