The Akyem mine is an orogenic gold deposit that has oxide and primary mineralization.

The Akyem deposit is localized in the hanging wall (upper side or plate) of a regional fault that trends to the northeast (N70°E) parallel to regional structures and dips to the southeast (S60°E) parallel to the foliation developed in a Birimian host rock. The planar fault structure (thrust fault)[11,12] is intensely sheared and exhibits a mylonitic to cataclastic fragmental texture consisting of lens of metavolcanic fragments in a matrix of sheared and plastically deformed graphitic material. The presence of graphitic rubble zones suggests reactivation of the fault zone over time. The fault occurs in fine grained, gray green massive to locally sheared Birimian mafic metavolcanic rocks exhibiting chlorite and carbonate alteration that locally contain euhedral magnetite. Immediately overlying the metavolcanics is a distinctive gray green pink unit containing blue quartz phenocrysts in a mylonitic matrix (quartz epiclastic rock). The upper and lower contacts of this unit are typically sheared and brecciated, and the upper contact of this unit is locally in sharp contact with overlying light gray tan chert. This unit is considered sedimentary and represents a distinctive marker between the metavolcanic and metasedimentary units of the Birimian. The overlying metasedimentary rocks are for the most part turbidite sequences consisting of graywacke, argillites, black carbonaceous siltstone, and fine grained arkosic sandstones. This unit grades upward into a saprolitically weathered zone (deeply weathered bedrock largely altered to clay) that ranges from 10 to 50 m thick. The saprolite consists of lateritic clay and quartz fragments with as much as 25% weathered rock remaining within the saprolite. Near the surface, in the upper 1–5 m, red lateritic clay is developed as subsoil.

The Akyem mine is an orogenic gold deposit that has oxide and primary mineralization. The gold is found in shear zones within greenschist-facies metasediments that have kilometer-scale vertical and lateral extent. Gold occurs primarily in pyrite and secondarily as native gold in quartz veins.

Akyem mine is an open pit mining operation.

The mining method at the Akyem mine involves removal of ore and waste rock from an open pit mine. The open pit is an elongated structure consisting of a large western lobe (Main Pit) and a small eastern lobe (East Pit), connected near the surface.

Mining is conducted using large scale conventional hard rock drill and blast open pit methodology. Run of Mine (ROM) ore is trucked from the pits using CAT 785 DT’s.

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The Akyem Process Plant consists of a conventional mill and carbon-in-leach (CIL) circuit. Ore from the mine workings is transported to a crushing, grinding and milling circuit. Ore processing consists of CIL cyanidation, elution and gold recovery. Tailings material is conveyed by pipeline to a counter-current decantation (CCD) plant where tailings are rinsed with water to reduce Weak Acid Dissociable (WAD) cyanide concentrations to less than 50ppm WAD cyanide. The tailings are pumped from the CCD circuit via a dedicated pipeline contained within a lined tailings trench, to an engineered tailings storage facility (TSF) for final disposal. Tailings water is recovered from a decant pond, and recycled back to the process plant for re-use in the milling circuit.