The Ghana Chamber of Mines has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) to foster solutions to improve the recovery of gold from carbonaceous orebodies.

Carbonaceous orebodies are those that do not yield completely to conventional processing methods and are therefore associated with low recoveries. However, these orebodies abound in Ghana and pose a significant challenge to miners who encounter them.

To address this problem, the Chamber announced a research grant of US$219,318 to UMaT over a three-year period (2024 to 2026) to deal with the challenge. "This is a great day in the annals of the mining industry and the Ghana Chamber of Mines. I think this ceremony is quite epochal," Dr. Sulemana Koney, Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, said.

“We are optimistic that this support would produce results that would address the perennial low recovery associated with carbonaceous orebodies. This would benefit Ghana’s mining industry and the larger global mining industry,” he added.

Dr. Koney said it took more than mining to generate and create value out of the whole mining process, adding that recoveries were key to the industry. "We are talking about an orebody that is difficult to treat and for which reason if you apply the conventional methods of processing, you are getting about 55% in recovery. This is below par and effectively it will make the whole endeavor uneconomic," he said.

Dr. Koney said the partnership would ensure professors in UMaT were able to complete studies that would enable more recovery to support the country and industry. "One of the goals of the Ghana Chamber of Mines is to look for solutions for problems in the mining industry across the board and therefore any time we have an opportunity to identify challenges within the mining industry and we believe that we have the capability to actually address them then naturally we would put our best foot forward to ensure that we deliver this," he added.

Dr. Koney said the partnership was not just about technology to help improve recoveries but to develop and harness the capabilities of three PhD students plus other master's programs. "So, it is not just that the outcome will be good for us. But alongside this is a whole capacity building we are creating within the mining space and within our country," Dr. Koney added.

Professor Richard Kwasi Amankwah, Vice-Chancellor of UMaT, expressed appreciation for the unprecedented support from the Chamber to the University over the years in the areas of educational scholarships for brilliant but needy students and research grants for lecturers.

He said that out of the three types of gold ores, the alluvial and the free milling were easy to treat while the refractory was difficult. "We have some ores in Takwa, so we call them the Takweian rocks. But the kind of ore that we have in there, some of them are very refractory and very difficult to treat."

He cited an example of a mine in Bogoso, which had to close its pit because of a poor recovery rate of 44 percent. "Over the years, we've had several kinds of processes that have come up to treat these difficult-to-treat ores, but the environmental challenges associated with these methods caused them to go down."

Professor Amankwah said these challenges led to several research and work on carbonaceous orebodies, leading to the discovery of the use of microbe to degrade carbonaceous orebodies. He said the support to scale up the study not only for it to exist in test tubes but possibly for it to become something that the minerals industry could adopt as maybe a plant operation at that level was a great move.

"So, this kind of support that we are getting today, to me, is a game-changer in the minerals industry," Professor Amankwah said.

He said as part of the partnership two PhDs and three Master's students would be trained on this project while more undergraduate students would benefit from the research.

Prof. Amankwah said the University would build, for the first time, a pilot gold processing plant in the university. "So that after the project has been done, we will have a certain pilot plant in the university that can be used possibly for a 5-ton per day kind of operation, so that people who run through the metallurgy programs in our university would have the hands-on information about how to run a processing plant even before they leave the university," he said.

Professor Grace Ofori Sarpong, Dean of the School of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Mines and Technology, was elated about the partnership and the impact it would have on the students. She pledged to do her best to lead this team and to do this research, train the PhDs, and the Masters students, adding the undergraduates, we'll have a lot to do under this funding.

The Ghana Chamber of Mines has a long-standing relationship with UMaT. In 2019, it set up a Tertiary Education Fund (TEF) to support teaching and learning in tertiary institutions. The Fund committed over $2 million to the first beneficiary institution, UMaT, in its first phase, 2019 to 2023. The Chamber’s support to UMaT under TEF was renewed for another five years, and we plan to commit over $2 million over the period.