By: OrePulse

Allied Gold has connected its Kurmuk gold mine in Ethiopia to the country's national electricity grid, commissioning and energizing a new power line in what the company called a key milestone in the project's advance toward full production.

The Toronto-listed miner said it also pushed first ore through Kurmuk's crushing circuit in September, with the operations team now taking over day-to-day running of the plant from the team that handled commissioning. The company described itself as "on track with mining activities" at the site.

Allied Gold has built up roughly one million tonnes of ore in stockpile at Kurmuk. It intends to grow that stockpile to about 1.5 million tonnes, enough to cover three months of feed to the processing plant, before commissioning the full circuit. The company said ore exposed through mining carried out so far has shown "expected widths and grades," a sign it says supports a gradual, controlled start-up rather than an immediate push to full-scale output.

Taken together, Allied Gold said the combined stockpiled and freshly mined ore would give it enough feed to support a controlled, steady ramp-up toward commercial production once the processing circuit is fully operational.

Grid power removes one of the last major infrastructure hurdles for a project that had relied on alternative arrangements during construction and initial commissioning. A connection to the national grid typically gives a mine a steadier and cheaper electricity supply than temporary generation, supporting continuous plant operation as it moves from testing toward sustained output.

The handover from a commissioning team to an operations team is itself a standard marker in a mine's development, usually signaling that a plant has moved beyond initial equipment testing and into a phase focused on building up steady throughput. Combined with the crushing circuit's start-up and the buildup of ore stockpiles, the sequence of milestones at Kurmuk points to the project advancing through the final stages before commercial production is declared.

Kurmuk's progress is being closely watched as a marker of how quickly new gold supply can come on stream in East Africa, given the scale of the investment already committed to the project's power, crushing and stockpiling infrastructure. Kurmuk is one of a small number of large-scale projects expected to add to Ethiopia's gold output in the years ahead, as the country works to expand formal mineral exports beyond its long-established artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector. Allied Gold has not given a specific date for when it expects to declare commercial production at the mine. Still, the combination of stockpiled and freshly mined ore is designed to cushion the plant's ramp-up as throughput builds toward design capacity.