The President of Guinea presided over the official opening of the Alufer Bel Air mine

SMM12, 13 March: bauxite miner Alufer Mining Limited officially opened its Bel Air Mine over the weekend with the attention of Guinean President Alfa Kant and others in the industry.

Although the ceremony marked the official opening of the mine, the project has so far yielded more than 1 million tons of bauxite, a major achievement, as most of the work is carried out during the rainy season in Guinea. The mine continues to produce bauxite at a sufficient rate to fill several off-take contracts that the company will implement for the mine next year. Bernie Pryor, chief executive of Alufer, praised the step as proof of the work of the company's operators to start the project online. Located 75 miles north of Conakry, Bel Air Mine is Alufer's flagship project in Guinea. The estimated reserves of the mine are 146 million tons of high-grade aluminates trihydrate, which is relatively low in silicon dioxide content.

Bernie Pryor, chief executive of Alufer, praised the step as proof of the work of the company's operators to start the project online. "We are pleased that the site was presided over by the President and that government and local officials participated in and officially commemorated the opening of the mine, and expressed our appreciation for the progress we have made in Bel Air," he said. We are pleased to be able to successfully strengthen the project in such a short period of time and look forward to achieving a stable state of production in the near future. Our ability to achieve this goal reflects our strong construction and engineering plans, and I would like to thank our team and the contractors involved in the project for all their efforts to date.

Alufer has been one of several companies active in Guinea, which has been at the centre of a large amount of bauxite mining in recent years. The country has large amounts of bauxite, but political and economic issues have long been difficult to harvest.

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