Scotgold Resources revealed that work at the mine continued uninterrupted throughout July in the high-grade area of the mine, as planned.

The firm said that mining activities further increased the volume and the quality of ore stored on the stockpile.

Scotgold said: “The ore thickness is wider than anticipated – producing more high-grade ore from this cut-and-fill section.”

A second dump truck for mining operations is expected to arrive at the end of this month and it is hoped that it will be available for use in September, The Press and Journal reports. 

In June, Scottish Financial News reported that Scotgold’s shares rose by over 4% after the firm announced a resolution of various technical issues affecting the processing plant. At the end of April, Scotgold stated that various technical issues had been resolved, but the company would require further funding before being able to increase production.

However, in early July, the firm announced that it was mining high-grade gold ore “far quicker than anticipated”.

In the update issued yesterday, the firm said: “Scotgold’s dual focus is to further enhance safe production through consistency and stability of mine and process plant operations, in parallel with the opening of multiple faces of ore in the underground mine itself.

“As part of the risk analysis approach implemented by the company, the process plant was taken offline several times throughout July to conduct further proactive inspections of risk areas to prevent future failures.

“This work proved useful in identifying a number of preventative measures which has resulted in the process plant having been in 24-hour operations since this work was completed.”

It added: “This step-change has seen the process plant average over 90% of design throughput for the last 10 days of the month.

“As planned, the process plant produced sufficient concentrate throughout the month to allow another shipment of 25 tonnes of concentrate, further strengthening our goal to achieve steady ramp-up in production.”

The firm’s stock closed at 2.5% at 62.5p yesterday.