Ghana Electrolytic Gold Refining Line: Project Guide

A greenfield electrolytic gold refining line in Ghana is procured in five steps: confirm dore feed through GoldBod, fix the purity target at 99.999%, size the Wohlwill and induction-melting train, secure USD letter-of-credit cover, and route the bid through the named refinery operator rather than open tender. Ghana’s gold export earnings hit US$20 billion in 2025, so the demand is real.

That export number, reported by the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) from Bank of Ghana data, more than doubled from US$10.3 billion in 2024. Until recently almost all of that gold left the country as dore, unrefined, to be finished in Switzerland, India, or the UAE. Ghana is now keeping that final refining step at home, and that single policy shift is what puts an electrolytic refining line on the procurement agenda. For the wider sector context, our Ghana cocoa and gold refining procurement guide maps both value-add mandates, and the Ghana industrial and procurement guide covers the macro picture. This page is the project layer: how a refining line actually gets bought.

Why Ghana is buying refining lines now

The driver is a feed mandate, not a mining boom. Large mines in Ghana have sold 20% of output to the state since 2022. The Bank of Ghana has now moved to lift that to 30%, and crucially the entire 30% is to be delivered as dore rather than refined gold, as Paul Bleboo, who heads the central bank’s gold-management programme, told mining.com. The mines deliver dore; somebody inside Ghana has to refine it. That somebody needs a line.

The numbers behind the policy are blunt. The same Bank of Ghana programme targets up to 157 tons of gold reserves by 2028, against 19.2 tons held in early 2026, with a discount of under 1% on industrial purchases to cover refining, freight, and purity losses. Every tonne of dore the state buys has to be lifted to investment-grade bullion before it counts toward reserves or sells at full value. That is the refining gap a foreign equipment supplier sells into.

There is a second economic motive that procurement teams cite directly: byproduct recovery. When Ghanaian dore was refined abroad, the silver and trace platinum-group metals separated out during refining stayed with the overseas refiner. GoldBod states that refining at home lets Ghana recover the silver content previously lost abroad. A refining line that recovers silver alongside gold answers a question the buyer is already asking.

What a 99.999% line actually contains

The buyer-side target is purity. Ghana’s refineries are quoting 99.999%, five-nines bullion, which is above the 99.5% LBMA Good Delivery minimum and the level that opens jewellery-grade and investment markets. Hitting five-nines from dore is a two-stage chemistry problem, and the equipment scope follows the chemistry.

The line starts with induction melting and bullion casting. Incoming dore, usually 80 to 95% gold, is melted and cast into anodes or shotted for the next stage. Mid-frequency induction furnaces with bullion-bar moulds and a homogenising step sit here.

Stage one is typically the Miller chlorination process, where chlorine gas is blown through the molten dore. Base metals form chlorides and skim off as slag, taking the gold to roughly 99.5%. Miller is fast and cheap but caps out below five-nines, so it is the bulk-purity step, not the finish.

Stage two is the Wohlwill electrolytic cell, which is where the “electrolytic” in the line name lives. The Miller-refined gold is cast as an anode and dissolved in a chloroauric-acid electrolyte under current; pure gold plates onto the cathode at 99.999% while silver, platinum, and palladium drop out for separate recovery. The Wohlwill train is the slow, capital-heavy heart of the line and the part a buyer scrutinises most.

Wrapped around those two stages: chlorine handling and scrubbing, an electrolyte make-up and filtration loop, a silver-recovery circuit (Moebius cells or cementation), fume extraction, an assay and quality-control lab to certify each bar, and security-grade bullion vaulting. A supplier can bid the whole skid-mounted line or a single subsystem, but the buyer reads the bid as a process guarantee, not a parts list. Quote the throughput in kilograms per day and the guaranteed output purity, because that is how the refinery operator scopes it.

Who issues the RFQ

This market does not tender openly, so knowing the buyer matters more than watching a portal.

GoldBod is the state gold aggregator and the policy engine. It buys dore from mines and artisanal miners and channels it to domestic refiners, so it sits upstream of every refining-line decision. GoldBod itself does not run furnaces; it picks the operator and takes equity.

Gold Coast Refinery in Accra is the first named operator. GoldBod signed a landmark agreement on 20 January 2026 to refine one metric tonne of gold a week at Gold Coast Refinery, which can process up to 100 metric tonnes a year. GoldBod took a 15% equity stake. The refinery’s technical lead, Dr Said Deraz, stated it has the capacity to produce gold at 99.999% purity, and GoldBod CEO Sammy Gyamfi noted the plant had been significantly underutilised before the deal. Underutilised capacity plus a fresh dore mandate is exactly the condition that triggers line upgrades and second-train RFQs.

Royal Ghana Gold in Accra is the second operator, a joint venture involving the Bank of Ghana, running a separate refining capacity. Behind both, South Africa’s Rand Refinery, the only LBMA-accredited refinery in Africa, provides technical supervision and the route to certification, so any new line is specified to satisfy Rand’s and the LBMA’s process requirements. The large mines that produce the dore, Newmont, Gold Fields, AngloGold Ashanti, and Cardinal Namdini, are the feed, not the buyer of the refining kit.

A practical consequence: the genuine entry point is a bilateral conversation with GoldBod and the operator, not a public notice. The dore-supply deals are negotiated, not advertised.

Paying for the line: FX, LCs, and ECA cover

Gold is Ghana’s single largest dollar earner, which puts a refinery buyer closer to hard currency than almost any other industrial buyer in the country. That matters for how a line gets paid.

Refining lines are quoted in USD or EUR against a confirmed documentary letter of credit. The buyer opens the LC through an Accra bank such as GCB, Ecobank, Stanbic, or Absa, and the supplier asks for confirmation through a London, Frankfurt, or Johannesburg bank. The milestone split on a process line is usually a down payment, a tranche against shipping documents, and a retention released on commissioning and a successful purity-acceptance test. Because gold generates the foreign currency the rest of the economy competes for, FX approval for a refinery import clears with less friction than in dollar-scarce sectors, helped by the cedi’s strong 2025 recovery under the IMF Extended Credit Facility.

Export-credit cover follows the kit’s origin. A European-built line carries Euler Hermes, SACE, or UKEF cover; a US line, EXIM; a Chinese line arrives with Sinosure financing attached. Naming the specific issuing and confirming banks and the ECA in your quote signals to a buyer who does this regularly that you understand the trade-finance side, which is half the decision on a capital line.

Conventional channels losing their grip

The old routes into a refinery buyer in Ghana are expensive relative to what they return, and they rarely reach the right person.

Trade fairs. Gold-sector vendors fly to Mining Indaba in Cape Town or work the Ghana International Trade Fair in Accra and the AGI Ghana Industrial Summit and Exhibition. A European stand runs USD 25,000 to USD 60,000 all-in and yields a handful of real conversations. The GoldBod refinery planners and operator engineers who scope an electrolytic line almost never work a booth floor.

Field representatives. An Accra-based regional manager costs USD 100,000 to USD 180,000 a year fully loaded, and a single rep cannot credibly cover a refining-line pursuit, a mine-side comminution opportunity, and an assay-lab tender at the same time.

Distributor and Chinese-channel lock-in. Much heavy industrial supply into Ghana still routes through Accra and Tema importer-distributors and Chinese supply channels that carry margin and a layer of distance between the OEM and the engineer writing the spec. In refining, Chinese-built kit often arrives with its own financing attached, which is hard to dislodge once a relationship is set. That lock-in is softening as operators want direct technical relationships and after-sales certainty on a line that has to hold five-nines, but assuming one distributor reaches both GoldBod and the operator is a stretch.

Against all three, papaverAI’s outbound model lands a qualified procurement lead in the USD 150 to USD 300 range and gets cheaper as it runs, versus the USD 300 to USD 900 linear cost of a trade-fair lead and the USD 500 to USD 1,200 of a field rep. The traditional channels have a cost ceiling. A targeted outbound engine has a compounding floor.

Where public procurement does apply

Most refining-line deals are bilateral, but the public layer still matters for any state-linked or co-owned project. Notices that do publish go through the Public Procurement Authority and the Ghana Electronic Procurement System, which indexes GoldBod and Minerals Commission packages. Register early: a Tax Identification Number and a system account are the baseline for visibility. The Minerals Commission carries the local-content overlay on mining-linked kit, and English is the working language throughout, which removes the translation layer that slows deals in Francophone neighbours.

FAQ

Who buys electrolytic gold refining lines in Ghana?

The named refinery operators, Gold Coast Refinery and Royal Ghana Gold, both in Accra, with GoldBod sitting upstream as the state aggregator that supplies the dore and takes equity. The large mines produce the dore feed but do not buy the refining kit.

What purity does a Ghana refining line need to hit?

99.999%, or five-nines bullion. That is above the LBMA Good Delivery minimum and requires a Miller chlorination stage to reach about 99.5% followed by a Wohlwill electrolytic cell to lift it to five-nines, plus a silver-recovery circuit.

Is the 30% dore rule actually in force?

The Bank of Ghana has moved to raise the share large mines sell to the state from 20% to 30%, with the full amount delivered as unrefined dore to feed local refineries. The dore form, rather than refined gold, is what creates the refining-line demand.

How is a refining line paid for in Ghana?

In USD or EUR against a confirmed letter of credit opened through an Accra bank and confirmed in London, Frankfurt, or Johannesburg. Export-credit cover follows the equipment origin: Euler Hermes, SACE, UKEF, EXIM, or Sinosure. Gold’s dollar earnings make FX approval smoother than in other sectors.

Do I bid through a public tender?

Usually not. The dore-supply and refining agreements are bilateral between GoldBod and the operator, so the real entry point is a direct technical conversation. Register on the public procurement system for any state-linked package, but treat the operator and GoldBod relationship as the primary route.

Send us your line spec

If you build electrolytic refining lines, induction melting and casting trains, Wohlwill cells, or silver-recovery circuits, the Ghana window is open now while operators size capacity against the new dore mandate. Send your spec, throughput in kilograms per day, guaranteed output purity, and drawings, and we will route it to the right buyer at GoldBod or the named operators. Get in touch here, or reach me directly at burak@papaverai.com to scope a refining-line slice. We build the continuous pipeline so your engineers talk to the people specifying the line, not the booth-floor crowd.