The Sabodala deposit is located in the West African Birimian belt near the Senegal-Mali border, about 650 km east of Senegal’s capital, Dakar, and about 90 km west of the Sadiola and Yatela gold mines in Mali. The project is owned 90% by Mineral Deposits and 10% by the government of Senegal.

The Sabodala mine plan calls for mining of a total of 22 million mt of ore and 142 million mt of waste from a pit that will eventually measure 1,000 by 600 m and reach a depth of 250 m. Mining is by conventional open-pit methods, using 170-mt and 280-mt Komatsu hydraulic shovels and 90-mt-capacity Komatsu haul trucks.

The Sabodala plant is designed to process 2 million mt/y, and Mineral Deposits reported that it had comfortably exceeded that rate in initial operations, processing softer oxide material at gold recoveries of about 95%. The flowsheet was designed by Ausenco and includes primary jaw crushing, followed by SAG and ball milling, with a recycle crushing circuit to handle critical-sized competent ore that has the potential to accumulate in the SAG mill. Milling is followed by gravity concentration, with gravity tails feeding to a CIL circuit. The gold room produces gold doré for shipment to the Metalor Technologies refinery at Marin, Switzerland.

Sabodala reserves as of November 2008 totaled 1.63 million oz of gold in 24.3 million mt grading 2.1 g/mt gold. Total resources were estimated at 3.51 million oz of gold.