By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 18
A high grade is worthless without a plant to treat it. At Uis the construction came first.
The story people tell about Uis is about what comes out of the ground. The story that decides whether the lithium pays is about what gets built on top of it: the plants, sorters and crushers that turn raw pegmatite into a saleable concentrate. Andrada spent 2025 and early 2026 adding processing capacity before the lithium resource was even counted.
That order of events is deliberate. A high grade underground is worthless until there is a plant to treat it, and construction, not geology, is usually the slower and more expensive half of turning a deposit into a mine.
The plant behind the grade
The most visible addition is the modular jig plant completed at Uis, designed for a nameplate throughput of 80 to 100 tonnes an hour and able to treat up to 40,000 tonnes of ore a month at roughly 70% recovery. It was commissioned on schedule and within budget, feeding on nearby pegmatite and existing stockpiles.
A modular build matters on a remote site. Fabricated in sections and assembled on the ground, it shortens the on-site construction window and the exposure to weather and logistics that makes desert building expensive. The plant is an engineering answer to distance as much as to metallurgy.
On a remote site, how a plant is built matters as much as what it processes.
Ore sorting as construction
The larger works are in pre-concentration. Andrada selected TOMRA XRT sensor-based sorters and took delivery of Metso crushers to build an ore-sorting circuit ahead of the main plant, aiming to lift processing throughput by around 60% and raise tin concentrate output over time. Sorting rejects waste rock early, so the plant treats richer feed.
For an engineer, that is capital spent to save capital. A sorter that removes barren rock before crushing shrinks the size, power draw and water use of everything downstream. The construction bill buys a smaller, cheaper operating footprint for years afterward.
Money spent on sorting up front buys a smaller, cheaper plant to run.
Distance sets the budget
Uis is a small former mining settlement in a semi-arid stretch of Erongo, and its remoteness prices the build. Materials travel far, water and power are not guaranteed, and every structure has to survive heat, dust and long gaps between maintenance visits. Remote construction is a distinct discipline, not ordinary construction marked up.
That is why durability outranks ambition here. The cheapest structure over its life is the one that keeps running with little attention, and a delayed delivery of steel or a failed pump can idle a crew far from the nearest replacement part in Swakopmund or Walvis Bay.
Distance, not architecture, writes the budget for anything built at Uis.
The engineering read
For the operation to scale from tin into lithium, the plant has to be extensible: circuits that can be added to, not rebuilt, as new metals and higher volumes come on. A processing train designed in modules can absorb a lithium stream more cheaply than one poured as a single monolith.
The property risk is the familiar one of over- and under-building. Too little capacity and the resource waits in the ground unsold; too much and idle plant drains cash while the market softens. The winning design tracks the resource as it is proven, not as it is hoped.
The right plant grows with the orebody rather than gambling ahead of it.
For a contractor, engineer or mining developer, Uis is a working example of how Namibian mine construction is evolving: modular plants, sensor-based sorting and a hard premium on low-maintenance durability in remote country. The decision it puts forward is whether to build capacity ahead of the lithium resource, or to stage each circuit only as the assays justify it.
Sources: The Namibian; Andrada completes second processing plant at Uis (African Mining Market); Andrada chooses TOMRA XRT sorting for Uis (Mining Weekly)
