My work in Mali

[LordAnubis]

So a few people have asked me about what it's like working in Mali.

So i live in a house. 5 bedroom, i stay in the master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. Here's my room. It's got a TV (i've never turned it on), microwave, fridge, sandwich toaster and safe.

The outside of the house.

The backyard. As you can see pretty much a forrest. I get heaps of moneys in the yard (and in the house when people leave the door open). The back room is like a sun room all fly screened in so when i smoke i generally have a session there... or at the wet mess.

This is the dry mess where we eat food. Hot and cold buffets. Breakfast lunch and dinner is served here. The food is basically 2 or 3 different dishes every night. Normally a soup option as well and plenty of salads/veggies.

The pool. About 20 meters. Its got jets on the side of to try and keep the water moving to prevent mossies laying eggs in the water. In the hut is the gym with usual stuff. Behind the building (not in view) is a basketball/tennis court. We also play indoor cricket in there.

The oval, at the end of the oval you can see a fence in that is the beach volleyball court. No female Brazilian beach volley ball team here though unfortunately

The golf course. Full dirt course with sand greens. Balls ricochet like a mofo when you hit a rock or something. Adds some humour to the game.

Then the deck of the wet mess (bar). The grass patch used to be a pool, but it was attracting too many mozzies so we filled it in and now its our outdoor theater. We put the projector screen on the big frame and project a movie or the AFL grand final on it.

The inside of the wet mess.

Now on to the process plant.

Ground view of the plant… the car is parked in front of the office (to the left out of view). The big stack is where all the sulphur gases pour out of, to the right is the mill, in the middle kind of is the roaster area and to the left of the picture is the flotation cells.

Start off at the mill. There is a crusher that I haven’t taken a photo of, but mining give us rocks the size of a car. The crushers crush these rocks down to the size of table tennis balls. Then the table tennis ball sized rocks go into the mill (there’s three of them). The mill just turns around and around like a dryer. Inside the mill we add water and some big steel balls (like shotput balls) and as the mill turns the steel balls bash against the table tennis sized rocks and grind them down smaller than grains of sand. Side view while standing next to it, and a view from the side… you can see the grey coloured slurry (what we call sand mixed with water) splashing out of the back of the mill.

The slurry then goes to the flotation cells. It’s basically a big tank with a mixer in it. The mixer adds air into the slurry to form bubbles and we add various chemicals as well. It's essentially a big bubble bath. The gold mineral sticks to the bubbles and floats to the top, and looks dark grey/charcoal in colour. You can see the froth that chalky looking stuff on the top at the bottom of the photo.

Then it goes to the roaster. The roasters only job is to basically burn the concentrate that floated. The aim is to burn off the sulphur from the concentrate because that’s not good for the downstream processes.

Once roasted we call it calcine and it goes into the cyanide leach circuit. We add cyanide and the gold dissolves the cyanide from the rock and then the gold will be in the water. There is also chunks of carbon in the slurry so as soon as the cyanide dissolves the gold the carbon is right there to absorb the gold. So now we have moved the gold from the rocks into water and then onto the carbon. We then get the carbon out of the slurry by screening it out (all the water and sand goes through the sieve but the chunks of carbon doesn’t go through the screen). Here’s what an empty tank looks like and a full tank with slurry in it... see how its now a brown/red colour and not dark grey.

The next processes I can’t take photos of but basically we then get the gold off the carbon and back into liquid (why do this process you ask.. the aim is to get the gold in LESS water than it was originally in.. purely for efficiency and cost effective purposes). Then the small volume of solution is put into electrowinning cells. Basically we pump the water around and there are plates which we pass electricity through. The gold comes out of the solution and onto the plates. At this point it is about 60% pure gold. That then goes into a furnace and is melted at 1800 degrees with a few extra chemicals and then we pour a gold bar that is about 90% pure. And that’s the end of the process. From there the gold bars get sent to a refinery in Switzerland and gets sold to the market.

Here's a process flow diagram of how the whole circuit works.

Lastly, here's our air strip.

And a few panoramas of the plant.

So that's where i spend my time at work for 49 consecutive days. Certainly no mud hut village. It's pretty much a resort Certainly no complaints from me.

[bradbrennan]

Impressive, that's quite a process!

[madandana]

Thanks for sharing that. Very interesting. What the tower for in the pool shot?

Was that a runway for air planes? Are you in the middle of nowhere?

[Miner]

Great write up Mus

I always wondered what you guys did wth the rock we send you !!

Cheers

[LordAnubis]

Great write up Mus

I always wondered what you guys did wth the rock we send you !!

Cheers

Ahaha you mean the waste you send us ??

[LordAnubis]

Thanks for sharing that. Very interesting. What the tower for in the pool shot?

Was that a runway for air planes? Are you in the middle of nowhere?

It just has the camp siren on the top of it (which barely works). Not used for anything else.

And yes we land Beechcraft 1900Cs on the strip... its 2.3 km's long or something. The charter plane picks us up from the mine site and flies us to a town called Sikasso where we just stamp out of Mali then get back on the plane and fly to Accra. From Accra all the workers go their ways either via British Airways, KLM, Turkish Airlines or Emirates to their points of hire.

[Trimming]

Nice write up. Is it nerve racking or protected well ? I hear the is that is a training Country for terrorists.

[Joker]

Great write up Mus

Thanks for sharing

[...]

Thanks for sharing! Visited a few mines for work, including gold extraction plants. Love the machinery!

[headstand]

Fascinating. Thanks for taking us through the process, and showing us around your digs. How much time off do you get between 49 day stints?

[LGC]

Interesting stuff. I've worked with the same type of ball mills. They were used to crush limestone in a WFGD (wet flue gas desulfurization) process on coal fired power plants. I certainly don't miss doing the commissioning work at power plants and paper mills.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[El Presidente]

Thanks Mus! I have always wondered what entails in your time away on site

[Guest rob]

Thanks Mus! I have always wondered what entails in your time away on site

+1

Certainly hard to be away from home for that kind of stretch. Great post, mate.

[LordAnubis]

Nice write up. Is it nerve racking or protected well ? I hear the is that is a training Country for terrorists.

We have a fence around hte mine and a few security staff but that's more for insurance purposes than anything else. The southern part of mali (we are about 9km away from the Ivory Coast border so very far south) is pretty safe, in fact the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade just recently reduced the risk rating for travel to the south of Mali. Norther Mali is where the touregs are in the desert.

Fascinating. Thanks for taking us through the process, and showing us around your digs. How much time off do you get between 49 day stints?

None. We work 49 consecutive days no days off in between. It's pretty lenient in that if you are tired and need a sleep in once a fortnight or something then you can, everything in moderation as the saying goes. After our 49 days of work we get 28 days off. So our roster is 7 weeks on site and 4 weeks offsite.

[polarbear]

Nice digs Mus

Certainly better than some of the camps I've seen in Aus

[Jeremy Festa]

Really cool insight! Cheers!

Sent from my iPhone

[Anchan]

Thanks for sharing!

[OZCUBAN]

Great post mate,great to see for ourselves what you have been explaining over the last few herfs about your work

and to see the place that keeps you from our company for most of the year

cheers Mate

[aushy]

Thanks for sharing that! I'm studying chemical engineering so I love seeing how processes work.

[ZinZan]

That's super cool, thanks for sharing.

[JerseyG]

Thank you!

[JohnS]

I understand now how much you look forward to and enjoy herfs when you get time off, Mus.

[sanity]

Thanks for sharing. First time seeing something like this. Felt like I was there, the way you explained it.

[LordAnubis]

Maybe this

EDIT: Ok now i see this video upload seem to work let me explain. So we bought a drone. I'm taking it upon myself to fly the thing. So ive been flying it and learning how to do different things with it etc. This is one of the holes on our golf course. Manual flight, so pretty shit. I'm going to to be plotting a waypoint course and doing some low altitude passes to get some good shots of the whole course. This video is super low res. this file was compressed from 600mb down to 4mb so i could easily send it though watsapp etc.

My job is so hard

IMG_7971.mp4

[Ethernut]

Those Drone Vids never get old!!