Perseus Mining 'Frustrated' by Power Supply Failure

A substation malfunction has triggered a major power supply failure at Perseus Mining’s Edikan gold mine in Ghana forcing the company to rethink its plans of achieving 99,000 oz of gold for the second quarter. The Australian company labeled the incident as “extremely disappointing.”

The breakdown of a transformer on June 7 at a government-owned substation located at Edikan caused failure to all three voltage transformers on the circuit, damages to the insulators and several issues with power cables that feed into the Edikan processing plant.

“The availability of grid power to Edikan has been frustrating at recent times. We have been working extremely hard to address the matters that we can control, such as operating performance and operating costs and have, in the past 12 months, made major advances on both fronts,” said Perseus Mining CEO Jeff Quartermaine.

Following the repairs, production was restarted on June 10 after roughly 73 hours of unscheduled downtime.

“As a result, Edikan is required to reduce its power demand in the evenings until GridCo is able to source the replacement parts. GridCo is expected on site during the planned SAG mill maintenance shutdown on June 17 to carry out additional works on the substation,” the company noted.

Perseus Mining Ltd. is headquartered in Subiaco, Australia and operates through three segments: Australia, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. The company reported earlier this month it had received $6.7 million as a partial payment of its tax debt of $32.7 million owed to the company by the government of Ghana.