Lycopodium prides itself on maintaining relationships with past clients and their projects working together to ensure their plants continue to operate at a successful level. Such a situation exists with Endeavour Mining, a Canadian-based gold mining company producing over 530,000 ounces in 2016 from its five operating mines in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana in West Africa.
Through Ghanaian subsidiaries, Endeavour holds a 90% interest in the Nzema Gold Mine, which reached commercial production in 2011. Lycopodium was involved with the development of Nzema from the early study phase through to the provision of EPCM services to build the process plant.
Working with the same owner’s team that built Nzema, Lycopodium provided full EPCM services for the development of Endeavour’s Agbaou mine, some 200 km north of Abidjan, the economic capital of the country. Completed ahead of schedule and under budget, this low-cost mine achieved full commercial production in January 2014. Construction, from the start of clearing to first gold pour, took just 14 months and was achieved with an excellent safety record (2.8 million manhours with LTIFR of 0.7).
The existing mine uses a conventional open pit mining and gravity / CIL processing facilities designed to process 1.61 Mtpa of saprolite ore and 1.34 Mtpa for bedrock ore yielding ~110,000 ounces of gold per annum.
Currently, Endeavour is undertaking the Secondary and Pebble Crusher Project which involves the addition of secondary crushing and pebble-crushing circuits to the existing plant crusher. Adding these will provide increased flexibility and maintain throughput as the mine transitions to harder ores.
