【Ferro-alloys.com】The mining of first ore at East Manganese and start-up of the crushing and screening plant is a momentous milestone for Menar.

This highlights our Group’s continued investment in South Africa and operational targets to further diversify our mining portfolio.

The development of the mine has largely gone according to schedule and within budget, although we slightly revised projection to expose the manganese ore from July to August. We consider the execution to be in line with our plans. This is of course a huge achievement given the fact that it’s our first Manganese operation and it’s part of our diversification strategy.

East Manganese is an opencast mining operation with a 900 000 tons reserve. The manganese is extracted from three layers and blended to a grade of 36.5% manganese. We are in the process of ramping the mine up to produce 30 000 tons a month of run of mine manganese ore within the next three months. In order to achieve this, we need to send the material to the plant in the correct batches. To this end, we have established a grade control section on the mine and employed a grade control geologist, along with a supporting team and established a fully equipped onsite laboratory, to oversee the blending process.

The commissioning of the 350 ton/hour dry crushing and screening processing plant was completed in Septmeber.

East Manganese is the only mine in South Africa that was launched in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we started mining the box cut in September 2020. Although we have had a few cases of Covid in our development team, we were able to manage the situation in such a way that it had minimal impact on the overall development of the mine. We subscribe fully to all the Covid protocols applicable in the mining sector and our committed to the goal of zero harm.

• [Editor:zhaozihao]